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In addition, I want to talk about what happened to the resident commissioner's race. For those who are not familiar with Puerto Rican politics on the island, Puerto Rico as a territory sends a non-voting delegate to the [U.S.] House of Representatives, as do the other terrritories. Anibal Acevedo Vilar was a Popular member of the House of Representatives has just been elected. He is replacing Carlos Romero Barceló, founder of the pro-statehood party of the PNP, former mayor of San Juan, former governor. Extremely controversial figure. He's one of those political figures you either love him or you hate him. And there are very few people that are neutral towards Romero. He's out. Later we can discuss this in some greater detail but I did want to point out a couple of things looking at some of the advertisements of the past election.
This ad over here is for Rubén Berrios of the independence party. It's showing Rubén, party leader, walking on a beach. The imagery -- it's Vieques. The fact that he camped out on the beaches of Vieques for over -- a little over a year or about a year. He tried to campaign heavily on that issue. If there was a protest vote, and I don't have the polls to prove it, if there was, it went to the Partido Popular and not the independentistas.
Now it's interesting, when it came to the resident commissioner's race, Romero's ad which is on that first panel, big blue one, party's color, was talking we have to be careful, there are people out there who want to separate us from the United States. It's interesting because his main pro-commonwealth rival Anibal Acevedo Vílar openly campaigned on the Vieques issue: "I will be there to defend you when it comes to Vieques." So he really pulled for that "nationalist" vote and got 49% of the vote in Puerto Rico. Romero ended up with 45% of the vote.
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in partnership with the Center for Puerto Rican Studies (CENTRO) at Hunter College 
