Tristan Quintanilla left his job two hours early on Nov. 5 to cast his ballot at Ocean View Middle School in Hagåtña, Guam, the village on the island’s western shore where he grew up.
As he approached the polling site’s blue and white exterior, Quintanilla walked past several clusters of campaigners stationed outside. They were wearing election T-shirts, barbecuing and playing upbeat fiesta music. Later he said the experience was “bittersweet” because he could not fully participate in the U.S. presidential election.
More than 9,000 miles away from Quintanilla’s bayside hometown, thousands gathered in San Juan, Puerto Rico, for a similar voting experience. They stood in long lines, shielding themselves from rain with umbrellas, eager to make their voices heard on Election Day.
Guam, Puerto Rico and other unincorporated U.S. territories — American Samoa, the Northern Mariana Islands and the U.S. Virgin Islands — lack electoral votes and cannot participate in the selection of the U.S. president.
While the rest of the country was deciding a fiercely contested election, residents of these territories and relatives living on the mainland expressed deep frustration about their lack of inclusion.
Aside from American Samoa, where residents are classified as U.S. nationals, the residents of these other territories are U.S. citizens. Their citizenship status allows them to vote only if they move to and establish permanent residence in any of the 50 states or Washington, D.C.
On Election Day, they vote only in local elections, casting ballots for offices such as mayor and governor. Some territories, such as Guam and Puerto Rico, have symbolic polls on the ballot to measure the residents’ candidate preferences, but the results have no bearing on who becomes president.
Last year was the first time Puerto Rico had a symbolic poll on the ballot, with Vice President Kamala Harris securing 73% of the island’s votes, according to the Puerto Rico Report.
In Guam, the symbolic vote is referred to as a non-binding “straw poll,” a tradition that has existed since 1984. In this year’s contested straw poll, Harris won 49.5% of Guam’s vote, topping Donald Trump by 886 votes, according to Pacific Daily News.
Quintanilla, who previously worked as a policy analyst for local lawmakers, derisively referred to Guam’s straw poll as an “opinion poll.”
It was only the second time since 1984 that Guam’s symbolic poll did not predict the eventual presidential winner. The other time was in 2016, when Hillary Clinton received 71.6% of Guam’s vote but did not win the White House, Pacific Daily News reported.
“You can get a one-way airplane ticket to any place in the entire United States, and as soon as you become a resident there, you’re eligible to participate in the democratic process,” said George Laws Garcia, the executive director of Puerto Rico’s Statehood Council, a nonpartisan nonprofit organization advocating for equal rights for the citizens of Puerto Rico.
Despite being born and raised in Puerto Rico, Garcia’s first time voting occurred on the mainland when he moved to Chicago in 2005 to attend university. Like Quintanilla, Garcia described his right to vote as “bittersweet.” However, for him, the feeling stemmed from growing up witnessing his parents’ inability to participate in selecting the U.S. president.
“Knowing that I have the capacity to vote because I live stateside is something that I take a great deal of pride in,” he said. This year, Garcia, who is now based in Washington, D.C., took his school-aged children with him to vote to demonstrate the privilege.
Similarly, as Freddy Figueroa, a resident of Clark County, Nevada, approached the polls on November 1, he proudly wore a baseball cap adorned with a patch of Puerto Rico’s flag. He reflected on his privilege compared to his grandmother, who still lives on the island and cannot influence the Electoral College with her vote.
“I can’t wait to cast my vote,” Figueroa said as he geared up to walk into the crowded Desert Breeze Community Center on Nevada’s last day of early voting. He said he was especially motivated to support Harris after comedian Tony Hinchcliffe referred to Puerto Rico as a “floating island of garbage” during a Trump rally at Madison Square Garden in the campaign’s final stretch.
Puerto Rico and Guam became U.S. territories in 1898, following the Spanish-American War, as a result of the Treaty of Paris. In 1917, the Jones-Shafroth Act granted Puerto Ricans U.S. citizenship. Later, in 1950, the Organic Act of Guam, signed by President Harry Truman, conferred U.S. citizenship to Guamanians.
Since then, many politicians have worked diligently to advocate for the rights of U.S. citizens in these territories.
In 2008, Clinton rallied to celebrate her victory in Puerto Rico’s Democratic presidential primary. Both the Democrats and Republicans hold primaries in all five U.S. territories.
“I came to Puerto Rico to listen to your voices because your voices deserved to be heard,” Clinton said, smiling in a turquoise pantsuit as the sounds of the cheering crowd and “La Copa de la Vida” faded. “You voted, even though some tried to tell you that your votes wouldn’t count.”
The energy was equally lively at last summer’s Democratic National Convention when one of Puerto Rico’s delegates called the island “the commonwealth of Puerto Rico and the next state of the United States” before casting the territory’s votes for Harris.
November marked the sixth time Puerto Ricans voted on a ballot measure addressing statehood. Voters were asked to choose between statehood, independence or becoming a freely associated state, an independent nation with close ties to the U.S.
Once the votes were tallied, 57% supported Puerto Rico becoming a state. The symbolic measure did nothing but amplify their voices to the federal government.
Puerto Rico’s population exceeds 3 million, meaning it would likely have six Electoral College votes — the same as the battleground state of Nevada. The other four territories, however, have smaller populations than the city of Glendale, Calif.
Still, Guam held a similar referendum in 1982, according to Guam’s Election Commission. Of the 26,682 registered voters, 10,014 participated in the special election. Among those who voted, 49% favored commonwealth status within the United States, followed by statehood with 26% and maintaining the status quo with 10%. Each of the remaining options received less than 10% of the vote.
In a later legal battle, Davis v. Guam, a non-Chamorro person challenged a law restricting the right to vote on self-determination to native Chamorro people, according to Guam’s Commission on Decolonization. Since then, there has not been a ballot measure to change Guam’s territorial status.
Supporting the rights of U.S. citizens living in the territories is not solely a Democratic Party motive. Puerto Rico’s Republican Party chairman Angel M. Cintrón called Puerto Rico “the great 51st Republican state of the union” seconds before roll call at the Republican National Convention.
Shawn Gumataotao, a Republican senator in Guam’s state legislature, lamented his homeland’s lack of Electoral College influence.
“I sure would love to vote for their president,” he said in a Zoom interview one week before the election. “It would be a sign that the federal government can understand what’s happening here.”
“We are going through some of the pains, just like any other part of our country is going through,” Gumataotao said. “We see the national politics from a different lens.”
On December 11, the U.S. conducted its first ballistic missile defense test on Guam, which officials called a step toward helping shore up the territory’s defenses. However, while Guam and other U.S. territories are often recognized for their military presence, residents highlighted in interviews other ways the federal government impacts their daily lives.
According to the U.S. Census Bureau, in 2023, 39.6% of Puerto Ricans lived below the poverty line, a higher number than in any U.S. state or territory. However, Puerto Ricans are not eligible for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), which allows low-income U.S. citizens in the 50 states, the District of Columbia, Guam and the U.S. Virgin Islands to purchase food for their families.
Instead, those in Puerto Rico, along with residents of the Northern Mariana Islands and American Samoa, receive benefits through the Nutrition Assistance Program (NAP), a capped annual block grant from the federal government. The program has a limited capacity to respond to increased needs, according to USDA Food and Nutrition Services. Unlike SNAP, NAP cannot adjust needs based on poverty levels or expand during natural disasters.
The island is also still suffering in the aftermath of Hurricane Maria, the 2017 neighborhood-flattening storm that took the lives of nearly 3,000 Puerto Ricans and caused $90 billion in damages.
“It’s been a slow and difficult process of reconstruction,” said Jorge Duany, a professor of anthropology at Florida International University and the author of “Puerto Rico: What Everyone Needs to Know.” Duany, who visited Puerto Rico in November, noted that the island still experiences frequent blackouts and some businesses remain closed.
On the morning of New Year’s Eve, Puerto Rico experienced an island-wide blackout, leaving more than 1 million residents without power. The outage was caused by a failure in one of the electric lines at Costa Sur, one of the island’s main power plants, according to a Luma Energy Spokesperson who spoke with CBS News. This plant has received more than $140 million in FEMA funds since the 2020 earthquake. Both the Trump and Biden administrations allocated funds to FEMA to rebuild Puerto Rico’s infrastructure.
Still, Trump has been long-criticized for his response to Hurricane Maria and mocked for throwing paper towels at a crowd of hurricane victims at Calvary Chapel in Guaynabo, Puerto Rico, days after the natural disaster.
Many of these issues are why residents of U.S. territories long for a greater say in national politics.
“Even though we cannot vote for president, so many of us understand the gravity of the election,” Quintanilla said in a post-election interview. He wants greater control over Guam’s cost of living and quality of life. “We feel that isolation from the federal government.”
In another interview after Trump was inaugurated, he said he’s even more worried.
“I can easily imagine this administration categorically denying our place in the Union and rolling back our legal protections — including our citizenship status,” he said.
For Garcia, being isolated is unacceptable.
“We have zero say in the presidential election, and that’s devastating,” Garcia said after the election. “That shouldn’t be the case in the 21st century, in the greatest democracy in the world.”