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- By Levi Rickert
Opinion. One hundred years ago, President Calvin Coolidge signed an act granting American Indians U.S. citizenship. On June 1, 2024, we commemorated the 100th anniversary of this historic legislation, known as the Indian Citizenship Act of 1924, or the Snyder Act.
While American Indians gained citizenship in 1924, it took decades for many to secure the right to vote. For Native Americans, the fight for equality has persisted through the years, and voter suppression against Native communities continues even today.
As Interior Secretary Deb Haaland (Laguna Pueblo) reminds us, the Native vote is sacred.
On Election Day in 2020, CNN referred to Native Americans as “Something Else” in its exit polls graphic. Four years later, on Election Day 2024, NBC made an effort to better represent Native voters by using Edison Research to analyze how Native Americans voted in the presidential election of behalf of the National Election Pool (NEP), a group of news organizations, including NBC.
Unfortunately, their attempt fell short. The results misrepresented Native American voters, showing them supporting Donald Trump 65% to Kamala Harris’s 35%.
By the time this misinformation circulated on television and social media, Native News Online had already launched its own poll. Preliminary results from our poll showed a very different picture—Native voters had not suddenly become MAGA supporters, contrary to claims from some on the far right. However, because we were still in the early stages of our survey, we refrained from immediately addressing the misinformation. Instead, we prioritized conducting a more comprehensive and reflective study of Indian Country's political leanings.
Later that week, on Friday, Native News Online published an op-ed by Dr. Stephanie Fryberg (Tulalip Tribes), founding director of the Research for Indigenous Social Action & Equity (RISE) Center at Northwestern University and a professor of psychology at the same institution.
In her op-ed, Fryberg highlighted a persistent issue: many news organizations lack the tools and expertise to adequately cover Indigenous communities.
After further analysis of the methodologies employed by NEP members and direct discussions with Edison Research, we identified significant flaws in the sampling methods used to gauge the political perspectives of Native communities:
- Zero of the 306 election day and early voting polling places included in the exit poll were on tribal land;
- The Native voter sample size of approximately 229 individuals is too small to confidently assess the broad voting pattern of the Native population across the United States;
- Urban and suburban voices were over indexed, with 80% of respondents reporting one of the two as their area type and just 19% reporting their area as rural; and
- The South was over indexed in the sample, with 35% of respondents reporting it as their region, compared to 21% reporting the East, 22% the Midwest, and 23% the West.
Perhaps the most challenging aspect of research and data collection among Native Americans is self-identification. For various reasons, many people claim Native American ancestry. Among Native Americans, a common joke is that the largest "tribe" in Indian Country is the “Wannabe” tribe. A frequent claim by non-Natives is, “My great-great-grandmother was a Cherokee princess.”
Our Native News Online poll aimed to eliminate responses from self-identified “Wannabes.” We were not interested in their participation. Instead, we sought to understand the attitudes and behavior patterns of Native Americans who genuinely experience life as Indigenous people.
During the 2024 presidential election, Native News Online collaborated with the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University to conduct four separate waves of polling using Qualtrics, a trusted third-party firm. The final poll, conducted after the presidential election, concluded this series of surveys.
“We were interested in working with Qualtrics not only because it is a respected company in the polling field, but also because Qualtrics has experience conducting social science surveys for hard-to-reach populations. One of the ways Qualtrics achieves this is by collaborating with other peer companies, pooling resources to obtain a well-rounded cross-section of the target demographic,” Professor Stephen I. Hersh of the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University said.
Last week, the Indigenous Journalist Association (IJA) criticized NBC’s exit poll as “highly misleading and irresponsible.”
“American Indians only represent 1 percent of the total voters surveyed, meaning that a few hundred self-identifying respondents are being used to represent the diverse interests of millions of Indigenous people across the country. None of the exit poll locations, for example, were on tribal land,” the IJA said in a statement.
This is an important point. When Native News Online reporters collected election results after the November 5 election, they found that Native Americans living on or near tribal land voted overwhelmingly for Harris.
Among their findings were the following:
- On the Red Lake Indian Reservation in northern Minnesota, 92% of voters cast their ballots for Kamala Harris.
- On the Menominee Indian Reservation in Wisconsin, 80% voted for Harris.
- In Apache County, Arizona, where the Navajo Nation accounts for two-thirds of the population, 58% voted for Harris compared to 39% for Trump.
Clearly, the NBC exit poll was misinformation. A more thorough effort would have provided their researchers with better data.
Native News Online published its post-election poll last Friday, showing Trump narrowly defeating Harris 51% to 47% among Native Americans. However, the 51% was rounded up, making it far from a clear mandate for the incoming administration to pursue its agenda in Indian Country.
From our tribal communities being referred to as “Something Else” to the misinformation stemming from a self-identification survey, it is evident that national media should collaborate with Native media to ensure accurate reporting.
Thayék gde nwéndëmen - We are all related.
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