SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico, Nov 3, (AP): The two parties that have dominated Puerto Rican politics for decades are losing their grip as they face the stiffest competition yet from a younger generation fed up with the island’s corruption, chronic power outages and mismanagement of public funds. For the first time in the island's governor's race, a third-party candidate has a powerful second lead in the polls ahead of the US territory's election Tuesday - and some experts say there’s a possibility he could win.

"This election is already historic,” said political analyst and university professor Jorge Schmidt Nieto. "It already marks a before and an after.” Juan Dalmau is running for Puerto Rico’s Independence Party and the Citizen Victory Movement, established in 2019. A Gaither international poll this month shows Dalmau closing in on Jenniffer González, a member of the New Progressive Party and Puerto Rico’s representative in Congress.

She beat Gov Pedro Pierluisi in their party’s primary in June. Gaither’s poll shows Dalmau with 29% of support versus González’s 31% as he nearly caught up with her since a different poll in July showed him with only 24% compared with González’s 43%. Coming in third was Jesús Manuel Ortiz, of the Popular Democratic Party, followed by Javier Jiménez of Project Dignity, a conservative party created in 2019.

Puerto Rican politics revolve around the island's status, and up until 2016, the New Progressive Party, which supports statehood, and the Popular Democratic Party, which supports the status quo, would split at least 90% of all votes during general elections, Schmidt said. But that year, US Congress created a federal control board to oversee Puerto Rico’s finances after the government announced it was unable to pay a more than $70 billion public debt load.

In 2017, Puerto Rico filed for the biggest US municipal bankruptcy in history. The debt was accrued through decades of corruption, mismanagement and excessive borrowing, with Puerto Rico’s Electric Power Authority still struggling to restructure its more than $9 billion debt, the largest of any government agency. Puerto Ricans have largely rejected and resented the board, created a year before Hurricane Maria slammed into the island as a powerful Category 4 storm, razing the electrical grid.