Native American voters could decide major races this Nov. 3 — but more than half have never been contacted by any campaign, and casting a ballot costs them more time and money than nearly any other group.
With 9.7 million American Indian and Alaska Native people in the U.S., Native voters could swing key elections in states including Alaska, Arizona, Michigan and Montana.
These voters, long underserved by campaigners, pollsters and post offices, now also face a federal proposal that could remove the American Indian and Alaska Native racial category from the 2030 census.
A politically ‘invisible’ bloc
Limited and sometimes misleading polling helps explain why “Native folks in the political realm, as in anywhere else in public life, are very much invisible,” said Michael Roberts, president and CEO of First Nations Development Institute, at an Oct. 9 American Community Media briefing.
In 2024, a national exit poll by Edison Research, circulated by CNN and other major outlets, suggested that at least 65% of a small sample of approximately 228 self-identified Native voters backed Donald Trump for president.
But a separate poll of about 500 Native voters, which First Nations helped field, found that 57% had voted for Kamala Harris and 39% for Trump.
“While the media was trying to find a brown boogeyman on why Mr. Trump was in office, we had real blocking and tackling data to show just the opposite,” said Roberts. “I don’t think we can look at Native voters as a monolith.”
The U.S. has 575 federally recognized tribes — 231 in Alaska, and the rest across 37 states.
Yet, 50% of surveyed Native voters reported no contact from either party ahead of the 2024 election.
Roberts said he expects the same this cycle, with Native voter engagement groups, like most nonprofits, being “terribly underfunded.”
While land rights (59%), tribal sovereignty (58%) and cultural and linguistic preservation (49%) headed Native voters’ 2024 concerns, inflation and affordability concerns (40%) rose, reflecting broader electorate trends.
Long distances to ballot boxes and a lack of opportunities to register to vote are among the barriers Native Americans face when trying to vote, says Jacqueline de Leon, staff attorney at the Native American Rights Fund.
The urban-rural voter gap was also narrower than often assumed: 82% of respondents living on or near a reservation said they consider tribal issues while voting, compared to 72% of urban residents, per First Nations’ 2024 data.
While tribal sovereignty and cultural issues “may drive Native voters to the polls more so than everyday pocketbook issues,” said Roberts, “people keep trying to make Natives these kinds of mythical other creatures, when we’re like everybody else. We care about: Do we have good jobs? Can we care for our families? Can we live in decent housing? Do we have decent roads to drive on? … We, like everybody else, are humans living in America.”
A First Nations census data analysis finds that 54% of American Indians and Alaska Natives live in rural and small-town areas on or within 20 miles of reservations.
Barriers to voting
“Something we know about voting, setting aside race, color, creed, anything else, is that if it’s harder to do so, people don’t do it,” said Melissa Rogers, a politics and policy professor at Claremont Graduate University. “Raising costs really drives down turnout.”
Polling sites and registration offices often sit in county seats, which are still farther from reservations than other communities generally are, Rogers’ research shows.
Residents of Nevada’s Duck Valley Reservation, for example, had to travel nearly 200 miles round-trip to reach their polling place in Elko County, and were told they had only eight hours to vote early over two separate days on their reservation — compared to 120 hours of opportunities before and on Election Day for other Elko residents.
The issue led to Shoshone and Paiute tribes suing Elko County in 2022 and winning, establishing the reservation’s first voting center and expanding access for more than 500 registered voters on its Nevada side.
“They would have had to drive two hours in bad conditions, bad roads, winter, to reach their polling place,” said Rogers. “This is also true of registration.”
A Native American Rights Fund analysis finds that in 2020, of the 4.7 million Native Americans of voting age, 34% of those eligible to vote — over 1.5 million — were unregistered.
“When registration and polling places are put on tribal lands, this makes tribal voting surge because you’ve reduced these costs … and they feel heard. They have more trust that their vote is going to be counted,” Rogers explained.
Nor is voting by mail a reliable fix: With no home address delivery for many reservation residents, these voters must travel to post offices and rent P.O. boxes just to receive election mail.
In Arizona, Navajo Nation advocates estimate that some voters must travel 40 to 150 miles round-trip just to pick up mail.
Voter ID requirements compound these barriers for voters without conventional addresses, state driver’s licenses or public transportation.
Mobilizing Native voters on the ground
In Maine, young Wabanaki voters are organizing to fight those barriers themselves.
Sage Phillips, a citizen of the Penobscot Nation — part of the Wabanaki Confederacy of four federally recognized tribes — helped launch the Wabanaki Policy Youth Initiative after lobbying at the State House in Augusta, a building she said “was not designed for us, for our people.” On her advocacy visits, she noticed who was missing: “Where were our young Wabanaki voters?”
The initiative’s 20 youth members are pushing to amend the 1980 Maine Indian Claims Settlement Act excluding the Wabanaki nations from federal laws that benefit other tribes. This year, the organization also won funding to strengthen the state’s 2001 Wabanaki Studies law.
Since the legislative session ended last April, they have traveled throughout Maine briefing youth and elders, registering voters and questioning candidates for governor, Senate and Congress, said Phillips.
Maine’s next legislative session will be the first in which all four Wabanaki nations have a seated tribal representative — though they cannot vote on the House or Senate floor.
The initiative’s members are “working on issues that became laws before they were born,” Phillips added. “We are looking to have candidates who not only want to work with us, but look to us to let us decide what we want for a change. We don’t need you to write our laws and grant them to us.”
This need extends well beyond Maine.
Native Organizers Alliance has organizing fellows in 25 Native communities nationwide this year — and they report “a certain new level of urgency” among young voters “which we did not see in 2024,” said Judith LeBlanc, a Caddo Nation citizen and the group’s executive director.
Ballots reflect this urgency: A record number of at least 355 Native candidates are running for offices from local government to Congress and governor, up from the previous high of at least 263 in 2024.
“Representation is not the destination,” said LeBlanc, “but what it does do is give voice to the solution.”
This representation is now threatened by the official count itself.
At an Oct. 2 tribal consultation, the Census Bureau reviewed a Trump administration push to drop the American Indian and Alaska Native designation from the census, along with other race, ethnicity, gender and sexual orientation questions as part of a broader proposal to overhaul the 2030 census.
After more than 500 tribal representatives and advocates pushed back, the bureau extended public comment from Oct. 13 to Nov. 2.
For a population already undercounted — by an estimated 5.64% for reservation residents in 2020 — the change “would just eliminate, erase and totally obliterate the basis on which federal policies and funding allocations would be done” for a decade, said LeBlanc.
“We signed an agreement, gave up land, died for certain basic rights,” she added. “Voting is part of it since 1924. It’s one of our rights that needs to be protected.”
SELEN OZTURK
ACoM editor and research director Selen Ozturk was born in Istanbul and raised in the Bay Area. She holds a philosophy degree from UC Berkeley. Her work has been published in the San Francisco Chronicle, SFGATE, Bay City News, PopMatters, and Senses of Cinema, among many other outlets.
