The Native Vote Is Not Code for “Navajo”
In Arizona, significant support for Biden came from an Indigenous electorate no one is talking about.
This story is a project of the Indigenously newsletter. Sign up today. It’s free.
For Native voters this election year, we’ve been dealt one disappointing data dilemma after another. It began weeks leading up to Election Day when journalists casually cast us off as a “low voter turnout” population but with little modern evidence to support these claims. On Election Night, we were quickly othered into a “Something Else” category with little attention paid to the small but significant impact Native voters, everywhere, can have in an election cycle. And now, in an attempt to seemingly over-correct these disparities, the headlines read one thing — “Native Voters” — while the content is overwhelmingly fixated on another: one tribe, the Navajo Nation.
The Arizona Indigenous electorate, overall, should be recognized for helping flip Arizona from red to blueish this historic election year — only the second time in 68 years the state has favored a Democratic president. It’s emblematic of the small but significant swing vote that Natives have represented this year and in years past.
