The status plebiscite held in Puerto Rico on November 14, 1993, produced a vote in favor of retaining commonwealth status - under which the island is associated to the United States as a self-governing polity - as this option won a relative majority of the votes cast in the electoral event, which were distributed as follows: Statehood, 788,296 (46.3%); Commonwealth, 826,326 (48.6%); Independence, 75,620 (4.4%); and blank and void ballots, 10,748 (0.7%). Commonwealth won a majority of 38,030 votes over statehood. 1,700,990 of the 2,312,912 registered voters cast ballots, for a turnout rate of 73.5%.

The commonwealth option won in five of the eight Senate districts, with statehood winning in the remaining three, including the Carolina Senate District, where statehood won an 882-vote majority over commonwealth, out of 194,705 votes cast in that constituency. Likewise, the commonwealth won in 24 out of 40 House of Representatives districts, as opposed to 16 which voted for statehood. All of San Juan's five House districts voted for statehood, albeit in one of these, House district 2, commonwealth lost to statehood by a margin of 58 votes, out of 36,430 cast in that district. Of the island's 78 municipalities, 55 voted for commonwealth and 23 for statehood.

By comparison, in the 1992 general election, the New Progressive Party (PNP), which supports statehood for Puerto Rico, won 914,994 votes (50.3%) against 829,057 (45.6%) for the Popular Democratic Party (PPD), which backs continued commonwealth status - an arrangement established in 1952, under the governorship of the party's founding leader, Don Luis Muñoz-Marín - and 75,166 (4.1%) for the Puerto Rican Independence Party (PIP), which, as its name implies, advocates the separation of the island from the United States. In these elections, the PNP won the mayoralties of 54 municipalities, against 24 for the PPD.