A simple majority, a non-binding vote

Held on November 3, 2020, alongside the general election, Puerto Rico's sixth status referendum broke with the format of all previous referendums. Instead of several options spread across one or two questions, voters faced a single yes or no: should Puerto Rico become a state? It was the first time the island's status question had been put to voters in such a simple form.

Statehood won, but narrowly: 52% of the vote, far from the 97% avalanche the 2017 referendum had produced under its low-turnout, boycott conditions. A single clean question, answered by a broader slice of voters, produced a much closer result than the more tangled referendums that came before.

Like all previous Puerto Rican status referendums, the 2020 vote was not binding. Only the United States Congress can grant statehood, and no referendum result — however structured or however many people vote — changes that constitutional reality on its own. The Trump administration's Department of Justice had also not pre-approved the referendum's process, adding another layer of procedural uncertainty to a vote that was already legally advisory and not decisive.

The political lines were predictable: the pro-statehood New Progressive Party backed the measure, while the Popular Democratic Party and the Puerto Rican Independence Party opposed it. What made 2020 notable was not that it settled anything — non-binding votes rarely do — but that it produced the closest and most directly asked result of any Puerto Rican status referendum to that point, a near-even split on a question the island had been asking itself, in one form or another, for over a century.

A 52% result carries a very different political message than a 97% avalanche built on a boycott, though neither obligates Congress to do anything. It suggested a genuinely divided electorate rather than a lopsided one, and it arrived at a moment when Puerto Rico's own population had shrunk and its diaspora had grown: a demographic backdrop this blog turns to next.

Sources: Referendo de estatus de Puerto Rico de 2020. Freeze 2026-08-22.