María Mercedes-Grubb was about to sprinkle coarse salt on a perfectly grilled steak one night this summer at a new restaurant in San Juan when the power went out, forcing it to close hours early.
The restaurant, Mamplé, where she is executive chef, endured at least five blackouts in the first month after opening, Ms. Mercedes-Grubb said, each one a financial drain on the business and its employees.
“In a restaurant, it takes weeks to make what you lose in a day’s worth of work,” she said. “It’s really sad having your whole staff sitting out front, without making money.”
Power outages have increased in frequency and duration in Puerto Rico over the past year, government data shows, disrupting all facets of life. Seven years after Hurricane Maria ravaged the island, the power grid remains fragile, inefficient and expensive — Puerto Ricans pay some of the nation’s highest electrical bills — despite the privatization of the power transmission and distribution system in 2021.
Puerto Ricans living in swing states became a focus of attention in the presidential election this week after a comedian at a rally for former President Donald J. Trump called Puerto Rico a “floating island of garbage.” Vice President Kamala Harris and her allies amplified and denounced the offensive remark, while Mr. Trump quickly sought to distance himself from it.
But the more than 3.2 million Puerto Ricans living in Puerto Rico cannot vote for president beyond a symbolic ballot. Their most consequential election on Tuesday is for governor, and a leading issue in that four-way race has been the electricity problem, which got worse after Hurricane Ernesto brushed the island in August.
The blackouts have recently prompted an unusual burst of political engagement, in part because they are harming small businesses that make up an important piece of the economy. Some businesses have offered deals to customers who showed proof that they had registered to vote. In social media posts about having to close because of a power outage, the owners have encouraged people to vote. New voter registrations in recent months were robust.
By the time the candidates for governor debated on television this month, all four said that they supported canceling the island’s 15-year contract with Luma Energy, the private Canadian-American consortium that took over the electrical grid. Not all of them had initially held that position.
Their stance is more political than practical: Ending the contract early could cost hundreds of millions of dollars and would require the approval of the fiscal board, appointed by Congress, that has overseen Puerto Rico’s finances since 2016.
Though critics point to the power outages as evidence of poor performance, Luma says it is focused on “overcoming historic challenges” that have plagued the electrical system.
“To be clear, we’ve made substantial progress while meeting all the requirements of Luma’s contract, and we’ve remained on budget, without raising our rates,” Luma said in a statement. “Our commitment to Puerto Rico is clear.”
The power outages — along with a housing crisis, the high cost of living, the slow hurricane recovery and a prolonged financial crisis — have hastened an extraordinary political shift.
The shift has given rise to third parties and to a coalition candidate for governor, Juan Dalmau, who is running a close second in public opinion polls. Were Mr. Dalmau, a former state senator, to pull off an upset, he would become the first governor not affiliated with either of the two parties that have dominated politics on the island for more than half a century.
Puerto Rican politics do not neatly align with those on the mainland. The candidate leading in the polls, Representative Jenniffer González-Colón, Puerto Rico’s nonvoting member of Congress, is a Trump-aligned Republican who leads the New Progressive Party, which supports Puerto Rican statehood.
Mr. Dalmau is not a Democrat or a Republican; the coalition he represents, known as Alianza, includes the longstanding pro-independence party and one of the new, smaller parties that has emerged. The new parties have been less concerned with the defining question of Puerto Rico’s political status and more focused on social and economic policy, including energy policy.
There is no easy fix for the electrical system and its aging infrastructure after decades of lack of investment and past mismanagement. Reconstruction is slow and dependent on federal funds. But even if a new governor cannot easily cancel Luma’s contract, he or she could enforce or enhance oversight mechanisms.
Mr. Dalmau has proposed returning control of power plants and the electrical grid to the public sector under an independent energy agency and transitioning to renewable power sources. Ms. González-Colón has proposed naming an energy czar to oversee the private power companies and hold them accountable while fostering more competition in the energy sector.
But some small-business owners are wondering how long they can wait. Xavier Ramos Oliver and his business partner, Ariana Camayd Cabán, were preparing to celebrate the second anniversary of their wine shop, Cru, in September when more blackouts forced them to buy a generator for $14,000, close to a third of their monthly revenue.
They had lost sales during power-related closures, as well as a refrigerator when a power surge fried its compressor. Customers who wanted to hold events at their shop would balk when they learned Cru did not have a generator.
“We didn’t have the money in the bank, so we bought it with a credit card,” Ms. Camayd Cabán said.
Ms. Mercedes-Grubb had to close her first restaurant in San Juan after Hurricane Maria. In the new, 35-seat restaurant on the ground floor of a residential building, there is not enough space for an adequate generator.
“That cannot be the solution,” she said. “The real solution here has to be for them to fix the electrical grid.”
She has been among the small-business owners encouraging customers on social media not only to vote, but to vote “neither red nor blue,” referring to Puerto Rico’s two traditional political parties.
“We need to vote differently,” said Ms. Mercedes-Grubb, who supports Mr. Dalmau. “It has always been the same politicians.”
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