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President Biden told an audience in Puerto Rico Monday that “I was sort of raised in the Puerto Rican community at home, politically” — despite the fact that only about 2,000 people of Puerto Rican ancestry lived in Delaware when he was launching his career five decades ago.
Biden has a habit of inflating his personal connection to audiences and made the claim while pledging Hurricane Fiona recovery aid during a trip to Ponce on the island’s southern coast.
“We have a very, in relative terms, a large Puerto Rican population in Delaware relative to our population,” Biden said in an unscripted aside. “We have the eighth largest black population of the country and between all minorities we have 20% of our state [that] is minority. And so I — I was sort of raised in the Puerto Rican community at home, politically.”
Biden, 79, was first elected to the US Senate in 1972 — two years after winning election to the New Castle, Del., County Council.
According to the 1970 US Census, Delaware had about 2,154 people who were either born in Puerto Rico or descended from Puerto Rican parents — roughly 0.39% of the First State’s population of nearly 550,000 at the time.
The number of Puerto Ricans in Delaware reached 4,857 — .81% of the state’s population — by the time Biden was serving his second term in the US Senate in 1980, according to that year’s census.
