Native American Voters, Political Contexts, and the 2018 Election

• In Event: Public Opinion, Mobilization and Race

Abstract

The 2018 election provides the context to re-visit several important political science questions, particularly as it relates to relative turnout in off-year elections. Among other important avenues to pursue: what explained the unprecedented turnout of the Native American electorate? We focus our work on how the Native American population voted and why. There is relatively little political science research to date that provides insight into these important yet understudied questions.

This paper examines how Native American voting is influenced by state, local, and tribal politics. In so doing, it deepens our understanding of Native American voting behavior in US federal elections. We analyze a nationally-representative poll of 600 Native American voters in the days before the 2018 midterm election. This poll asked respondents how they planned to vote in the congressional elections. It also asked respondents about their policy preferences, their partisan attachments, whether they were mobilized, and their other experiences and attitudes associated with political participation in the literature. Respondents were asked their age, gender, and educational attainment as well.

For this paper, we consider within-US variation in Native American voting and political attitudes, using data on where respondents lived and their tribal affiliation. We ask how living on, near, or at a distance from a reservation changes Native voting. The politics of the 573 Native Nations in the US vary tremendously, and we ask how Native American tribal identity relates to political behavior in US national politics. We also examine how state and urban politics and socioeconomics affect the political behavior of Native Americans.

This work has implications for scholarship on race, sovereignty, voting behavior, and political identity.

Authors

• Laura E. Evans, University of Washington

• Gabriel Sanchez, University of New Mexico