Puerto Rico may want statehood, but Turkey also wants to join the EU. In both cases the decision lies in DC or Brussels, not San Juan or Ankara. Puerto Rico may be a protectorate, but I don't think that formally entitles them to Union membership. That being said, if the US refuses to grant them statehood, they should be free to seek sovereignty as an independent nation.

All that aside, my rough estimate is that 90% of the Continental US interest in PR statehood is motivated by political calculus in the Senate and Electoral College. If PR was a red state instead of solid blue, I'd sincerely doubt you'd see statehood regularly discussed at the top of /r/politics.

That's obviously legally dispositive, insofar as those states representatives are who votes in Congress and we are discussing a potential action of the incoming Congressional majority.

> Puerto Rico may want statehood, but Turkey also wants to join the EU.

Turkey, wasn't incorporated into the EU by conquest and then denied voting participation in Union decisionmaking.

> All that aside, my rough estimate is that 90% of the Continental US interest in PR statehood is motivated by political calculus in the Senate and Electoral College.

Probably the majority, at any rate, is political calculus (not just partisan, but also on specific policy issues; and not just the Senate/EC, as the House isn't insignificant.)

But that's always been the case with the causes for (and against) new states. (And why “continental US”, do you really think Hawai’i is an exception here?)

Probably, but that's also been the case for basically every state ever admitted to the union. Remember when the US used to consider whether a state was slave for free before admission?

Even the statehood of Hawaii was politically charged. People genuinely feared the kind of people Hawaiian would send as representatives. Including, but not limited to Communists and anti-segregationists.

Alaska was opposed on the grounds that it would be a welfare state and that it would add a bunch of democrats to Congress.

And the 2017 referendum. And the 2012 referendum.

Three referendums in a decade all advocating for statehood ought to be a pretty clear sign that there is desire for statehood...

The 2012 referendum also had the statehood question effectively boycotted by many people who favored keeping the current status, because selecting "keep the current status" wasn't an option on that question (it was a separate question altogether, where it got 46% of the overall vote). So statehood got something like 61% of the votes of people who voted on the statehood-specific question at all, but only ~46% of the votes cast in the referendum; representing that as a "yes for statehood" is also pretty weird, since that's about the same number of votes that "keep the current status" got, with the remainder presumably favoring one of the other "more-independence" options.

2020 is different and new: it's the first Puerto Rico referendum I have seen where there was a sanely worded "state: yes or no?" question that actually got a majority voting for the "state" option (52.5% or so), with something resembling sane turnout (~55%).

So yes, respecting this is probably a good idea. "Respecting" the 2012 or 2017 results by making Puerto Rico a state would not have made any sense.

Edit: Now that I have read https://senado.pr.gov/Legislations/ps1467-20.pdf page 31 lines 6-15, which define the "no" answer to mean a specific course of action which is not just "don't become a state", I am less happy with this referendum. Now we have to guess at how many people knew what the "no" was defined to mean and voted for what they perceived as the lesser of two evils based on that....

As I understand it in this referendum "yes" referred to "become a state" while "no" referred to "become independent", with no option for "keep the status quo".

The best thing to do would probably a referendum with a ranked/approval voting between all three options.

You understand incorrectly. The question asked was:

“Should Puerto Rico be admitted immediately into the Union as a State? ( ) Yes ( ) No”

- Yes: I demand that the Federal Government immediately recognize the equality of my rights and responsibilities as an American citizen with statehood in permanent union with all the states of the Union.

- No: I reject permanent union with statehood and demand that the Federal Government immediately recognize the sovereignty of Puerto Rico separate from the United States of America with a "Treaty of Independence in Free Association" or with "Total Independence".

Notably, that excludes the status quo as an option. The part right after that says:

  In case the statehood "No" ends up as the majority choice, you must
  immediately start a process of transition to recognize the sovereignty
  of Puerto Rico separate from the United States of America with a
  "Treaty of Independence in Free Association" or with "Total
  Independence", following the description in this law.

Sadly, this doesn't seem to be uncommon. In one city-level referendum I am personally familiar with, both sides of the referendum submitted an argument to be put into the election materials. The "Yes" side (loosen a safety regulation) drastically misrepresented the status quo, implying that there was no safety regulation to begin with, and that their referendum would create it. But in reality, the "Yes" vote would loosen an existing regulation.

How small of a minority should be granted the power to deny the majority a say in their own national government?