Allentown's Barrio

We were told that the Puerto Rican community was the local key to the election this week, Matthew Tuerk was even featured in New Yorker Magazine.

However, to inject some reality into the Latino influence, the state house district that was created to represent Allentown's Latino population is held by a whitebread kid born and raised in New Jersey, whose Hispanic culture is limited to have eaten at Taco Bell once. Although Tuerk translates everything into Spanish, and the president of City Council facebooks exclusively in Spanish, they failed to educate their Hispanic constituents on the deceptiveness of the transfer tax referendum. These affordable housing advocates just made housing more expensive.

While the Latino political strength is overestimated, there is no disputing Allentown as a Democratic stronghold. All the city Democratic state representatives ran unopposed on Tuesday.