Native Americans Shift Right
Economic issues, not apology tours, pushed them toward Trump.
Many ethnic groups moved rightward in the 2024 election, and Native Americans are among them. Seventeen counties with majority-Native American populations swung toward President-elect Donald Trump by ten or more percentage points. Just as with black and Hispanic voters, Native Americans had concerns that extended beyond the identity politics and left-wing virtue signaling of Democrats and the Kamala Harris campaign. Nationally, a whopping 65 percent of Native American voters went for Trump.
The shift is striking because a Brookings Institution analysis published after the 2022 midterm elections found Native Americans still “solidly Democratic in their voting preferences.” Looking at data from an African American Research Collaborative poll with a nationally representative sample of Native American voters, the Brookings authors noted that in “House races across the country, Native Americans supported Democratic candidates at 56% relative to 40% of Native Americans who reported voting for Republicans.”
It’s hard to determine what portion of the overall electorate Native American voters accounted for in 2024, but we do know that these voters are concentrated in a handful of states—including Arizona, Wisconsin, and Montana. Thus, a swing of ten points in Republicans’ favor in the majority Native American counties in these states is significant even if it didn’t likely change the election’s outcome. What made Native Americans switch?
A week before the election, President Joe Biden appeared at the Gila River Indian Reservation in Arizona to make amends for the treatment of Indian children, particularly in boarding schools, at the hands of the United States government in the early decades of the twentieth century. “I formally apologize as President of the United States America for what we did. I formally apologize,” Biden told a cheering crowd. “It’s long overdue.” Parents voluntarily sent some of these children to the schools; others were taken there over their families’ objections. At the boarding schools, the children were often forbidden from speaking their native languages or practicing their culture’s traditions. “It’s horribly, horribly wrong. It’s a sin on our soul,” said Biden.
The event was part of a Biden administration effort to court the Native vote—such voters make up 5 percent of the population of Arizona, a key swing state. In early 2021, Biden appointed Deb Haaland as the first Native American Secretary of the Interior. Haaland, whose agency includes the Bureau of Indian Affairs, has set up roadblocks to oil and gas exploration on Native American territory and reestablished and expanded the boundaries of Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monuments in Utah. She enjoyed the vocal support of Hollywood celebrities like Leonardo DiCaprio, but her efforts met with objections from some local tribes who wanted to use part of the land for economic and cultural purposes. (President Trump had allowed freer use of these areas.)
Some Native American groups (particularly those in leadership) were on board with the Biden administration’s agenda. Young Natives were encouraged to get to the polls “by Skateboard, Bike—Or Horseback,” as an article in Teen Vogue urged. Native American leaders cooperated with celebrities like Mark Ruffalo to get out the vote.
It wasn’t enough to save Harris in Arizona. The truth is, like blacks and Hispanics, Native Americans have much in common with the white working class, which leaned heavily toward Trump. Whether they live on or off reservations, Native Americans are struggling economically, and they vote and act like typical rural voters. Ongoing apologies about historical wrongs that whites committed against them don’t seem to have resonated as Democrats had expected—much in the same way that reparations appeals have failed to move many black voters.
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Continue reading this article from City Journal, a publication of the Manhattan Institute.
