Alan Grayson Attacks Puerto Rican Republican Quinones with Ethnic Stereotypes

Former Congressman Alan Grayson, the Democrat who never missed an opportunity to lob charges of racism against Republicans while he was in Congress lost his House seat in 2010, is trying to come back to Congress in Florida’s newly-created Ninth Congressional District, and his campaign has bought a website that employs ethnic stereotypes to attack a Republican candidate of Puerto Rican descent, John Quinones.

Grayson, who is running unopposed in the Democratic primary, is attacking Quinones before the GOP primary to eliminate a candidate who can potentially give him and Democrats headaches in Central Florida’s famed — and important — I-4 corridor, where state elections are won. 

The site, johnqraisestaxes.com, shows Quinones in a “pava,” a straw hat traditionally associated with Puerto Ricans. Since Puerto Ricans tend to lean toward Democrats, Grayson’s website makes another assumption, that non-Puerto Rican Republicans would look less favorably upon a Puerto Rican candidate depicted in a pava hat. 

Jorge Bonilla, who edits the “El Tercer Riel” blog about Hispanic politics and has his pulse on politics in Central Florida, told Breitbart News that the prospect of a Puerto Rican-American Republican as an opponent scares Grayson. 

“Without a significant chunk of the Hispanic vote, there is no return path to Congress for Alan Grayson,” Bonilla said. “Thus, his best bet is to knock John out of the primary and scoop those Hispanic votes.”

Bonilla noted that nearly half of the Hispanic population in the district is of Puerto Rican origin, and if enough move over into the Republican column, it could also tip what is going to be an extremely close statewide outcome in November to Mitt Romney.

As a recent AP story about the significance of the Puerto Rican vote in Florida noted, “about half the self-identified 300,000 Hispanic voters are Democrats, one-fourth are Republicans and the rest are mostly independents” in the famed I-4 Corridor region in Central Florida. 

This is not the first time Grayson has engaged in such tactics. Grayson was once caught propping  up a fake Tea Party candidate and funding a fake Tea Party organization to siphon votes away from potential opponents he has feared.