The Daily Kos Elections Morning Digest is compiled by David Nir, Jeff Singer, Stephen Wolf, Carolyn Fiddler, and Matt Booker, with additional contributions from David Jarman, Steve Singiser, Daniel Donner, James Lambert, David Beard, and Arjun Jaikumar.
Leading Off
●PR-Gov: Puerto Rico Gov. Ricardo Rosselló announced on Sunday that he would not seek a second term in 2020 and that he would also step down as head of the pro-statehood New Progressive Party (PNP), but he refused to resign from office despite massive protests calling for his departure. Rosselló has been in hot water over the last two weeks after a series of chats sent between the governor and his allies leaked where participants lobbed misogynist and homophobic attacks and joked about Puerto Ricans who died during Hurricane Maria.
Campaign ActionHowever, Rosselló was already in a precarious position before this month. The U.S. commonwealth has been in the midst of a horrific debt crisis for years, and things got even worse when Maria devastated the island in 2017 and led to a mass exodus of hundreds of thousands of residents. Rosselló's situation deteriorated in July when two former senior officials in the Rosselló administration were arrested by the FBI for allegedly directing federal funds to allied contractors.
Days later, Puerto Rico's Center for Investigative Journalism released hundreds of pages of chats sent between Rosselló and his top allies and cabinet members from 2018 into January of this year. These messages included an exchange where Chief Fiscal Officer Christian Sobrino Vega said he was "salivating to shoot" San Juan Mayor Carmen Yulín Cruz, to which the governor responded, "You'd be doing me a grand favor." Yulín Cruz, who is a member of the Popular Democratic Party (which supports Puerto Rico remaining a commonwealth rather than becoming a U.S. state) and has been a prominent critic of Rosselló and Donald Trump, is currently running for governor.
Those were far from the only awful messages. Rosselló attacked former New York City Council Speaker Melissa Mark-Viverito, who is from Puerto Rico, writing that people should "beat up that whore." Sobrino Vega also declared that singer Ricky Martin, who is gay, "is such a male chauvinist that he fucks men because women don't measure up. Pure patriarchy." Sobrino Vega also joked about the bodies filling the morgues after Maria, saying, "Now that we are on the subject, don't we have some cadavers to feed our crows?" (CNN writes that "crows" is a reference to the administration's critics.)
Massive protests quickly began calling for Rosselló to resign, and demonstrators were not deterred when he said Sunday that he just wouldn't seek re-election. There have also been plenty of calls for the governor to be removed from office, and on Friday, Puerto Rican House of Representatives President Carlos "Johnny" Méndez created a committee to advise him whether Rosselló had committed impeachable offenses. If a majority of the House voted to impeach, then it would take two-thirds of the Senate to vote to oust Rosselló.
However, it's not clear who would become governor if Rosselló is convicted or finally quits. Normally Secretary of State Luis Rivera Marin would take over if the governorship became vacant, but Marin himself will resign at the end of the month because of his own role in the chat scandal. The next person in the line of succession is Justice Minister Wanda Vazquez, who is a Rosselló appointee. One thing is certain, though: Now that Rosselló isn't running again, the last time any Puerto Rico governor won re-election will remain a quarter century ago in 1996.