Social Justice and Native American Political Engagement: Evidence from the 2020 Presidential Election

Address correspondence to Gabriel R. Sanchez, Department of Political Science, University of New Mexico, MSC 02 1645, Albuquerque, NM 87131, USA; email: sanchezg@unm.edu.

Public Opinion Quarterly, Volume 86, Issue S1, 2022, Pages 473–498, https://doi.org/10.1093/poq/nfac020

Cite

Gabriel R Sanchez, Raymond Foxworth, Social Justice and Native American Political Engagement: Evidence from the 2020 Presidential Election, Public Opinion Quarterly, Volume 86, Issue S1, 2022, Pages 473–498, https://doi.org/10.1093/poq/nfac020

Abstract

The run-up to the 2020 election in the United States was marked by an unprecedented health pandemic and a social movement to challenge structural racism and advance social justice. Record numbers of Americans risked their health by protesting and voting in 2020. We analyze the relationship between a desire to advance social justice and Native American political behavior and political accountability utilizing data from the 2020 American Election Eve Survey’s large sample of Native American voters. We find that in 2020, both perceptions of racial discrimination and the COVID-19 health pandemic had a significant effect on Native American mobilization and political accountability. We also advance the limited research on the Native American electorate by finding that living on or very near tribal lands is a consequential factor for Native American political behavior and their pursuits for justice through political participation.

Native Americans are arguably the least understood subgroup of the American electorate, largely absent from national surveys ( Lavelle, Larsen, and Gundersen 2009; Capriccioso 2021). 1 For public opinion researchers, this absence presents significant challenges to understanding how socio-political factors shape political behavior and determine political outcomes for Native Americans.

Despite these data challenges, we know that Native Americans face harsh racism and discrimination at both individual and structural levels. Native Americans continue to be the poorest in American society ( Asante-Muhammad et al. 2022), more likely to be unemployed ( Maxim, Akee, and Sanchez 2022), and experience more negative health outcomes ( Jones 2006) than other Americans. Native Americans also report experiencing high instances of interpersonal and institutional discrimination, including high rates of discrimination in the courts, housing, health, and education ( Findling et al. 2019).

Native American discrimination also occurs in politics ( Findling et al. 2019). Several states have aggressively worked to suppress Native American voting rights to minimize Native American political influence ( McCool, Olson, and Robinson 2007; Schroedel and Aslanian 2015). Most recently, scholars have found that North Dakota’s photo-ID law disproportionately harmed Native American voters in that state ( Barreto et al. 2019; Barreto, Sanchez, and Walker 2022).

Though limited, existing research tells us that discrimination toward Native Americans is also shaped by residential location. Native Americans living in reservations tend to be poorer than whites and Native Americans who live in urban areas ( Davis, Roscigno, and Wilson 2016). Reservation communities tend to suffer from deficient infrastructure ( National Congress of American Indians 2017), have substandard and overcrowded housing ( Kunkel and Aspen Global Leadership Network 2020), and lack basic necessities like running water and sanitation ( Indian Health Service 2020). Moreover, in towns bordering Native American reservations, Native Americans are more likely to be victims of hate crimes ( Denetdale 2016) and report experiencing greater levels of interpersonal and institutional discrimination ( National Public Radio, Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, and Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health 2017). Despite these ongoing challenges, driven by centuries of settler colonial policies, genocide, and other forms of historical trauma ( Brave Heart and DeBruyn 1998; Walters et al. 2011), Native Americans remain committed to social change and social justice.

In this article, we examine how Native American social change and justice demands influence Native American vote choice and political mobilization. Vote choice is an important indicator of political accountability, especially in 2020, after a highly unusual presidential term that fostered polarization, xenophobia, and racism ( MacWilliams 2016; Butt and Khalid 2018; Baker and Bader 2022). During the Trump presidency, Native American communities battled with Trump, and Republicans more broadly, on issues that affected Native American sovereignty, land rights, and well-being. This included Native communities voicing opposition to policies that disrupted Native lands and cultural sites in favor of extractive industry, and pushing hard to elevate the crisis of missing and murdered Indigenous women ( Udall 2020).

In the summer of 2020, during a global pandemic that ravaged many Native communities, the tragic and unjust murders of Black people by law enforcement had a mobilizing effect on Native Americans who protested alongside Black communities ( Belfi 2020). Since Native Americans are the most likely to be killed by law enforcement, as they comprise only 0.8 percent of the population but comprise 1.9 percent of police killings ( Males 2014), Native Americans protested alongside Black communities because of shared experiences of structural racism, police brutality, and racial profiling ( Lakota People’s Law Project 2015).

We test the extent to which the promotion of social justice is associated with Native American political action and political accountability in the 2020 election. Though other scholars have studied political histories of Native American injustice ( Deloria 1969; Wilkins 1997; Cook-Lynn 2001; Waziyatawin 2008), their research has focused on policies that shaped historical and ongoing inequalities and injustices in Native American communities. We take a different approach by drawing on data from the 2020 American Election Eve Survey, which has a large sample of Native American voters, allowing us to examine how social justice and demands for social change, including views of discrimination, COVID-19, and where Native Americans live, shape motivation for Native Americans to participate in politics and their vote choice.

In summary, we contend that for Native Americans, a vote against incumbent Donald Trump and protesting against police brutality and accountability in the criminal justice system were both calls for justice and social change.

Native Americans and Justice

Notions of justice are fundamental to individual political attitudes because they reinforce perceptions of fairness in the authoritative allocation of goods and services in society, or “who gets what.” Research has highlighted that individuals make cost/benefit calculations when making decisions about politics ( Downs 1957), but values related to justice and fairness are just as important in shaping how individuals view who should get what in the political world ( Hochschild 1981; Gibson 2008; Wilson 2021). Wilson argues, for example, that “deservingness” is a fundamental principle for determining allocation of resources in society. In general, those who feel they are deserving of positive political outcomes, but not rewarded at the level they expect, will feel a sense of injustice. This motive produces a desire to see wrongs righted so that justice prevails. This political motive is critical for Indigenous communities who have had their demands for justice and equity rebuked for generations, but due to their unique sovereign status are likely to have strong expectations that their demands should be heard and responded to.

In practice, however, justice for Native Americans has been elusive. In fact, during the formative years of the United States, American politicians created laws and political institutions to deny Native peoples the “core democratic concepts of fairness [and] justice … despite clearly pronounced treaty rights, federal policies of Indian self-determination and tribal self-governance” ( Wilkins 1997, p. 5). Lumbee scholar David Wilkins argues that early Supreme Court justices developed legal theories as masks to deprive Native Americans of justice, including their land rights and independence. The creation and institutionalization of legal doctrines like discovery, dependent nationhood, wardship, and conquest have been used as legal and political tools to reinforce and justify settler colonialism. Institutionalization of these doctrines stripped Native peoples of their humanity and inherent rights to land, language, culture, and sovereignty. Consequently, Native Americans have rarely obtained any meaningful measure of justice within the American political system.

The lack of justice for tribes is reflected in the long-standing land dispute that resulted in the case of United States v. Sioux Nation of Indians (1980), where the Supreme Court recognized that the dispossession of the sacred Black Hills, known as Paha Sapa in Lakota, was a violation of the 1868 Fort Laramie Treaty. Despite this ruling, the Court refused to return land to the aggrieved Native nations, instead providing monetary compensation (worth over $1 billion today) that the Oceti Sakowin (Sioux Nation) have refused to accept to this day. Santee scholar John LaVelle notes that because the Court “authorized compensation strictly in the form of money rather than the return of Paha Sapa, the Sioux Nation decision failed to deliver justice to the Great Sioux Nation” ( LaVelle 2001, pp. 63–64). This is one of many instances where Native people were not able to achieve meaningful justice, including the return of their lands, but continue to have a strong desire for accountability to right the wrongs of the past ( Deloria 1969; Cook-Lynn 2001; Waziyatawin 2008; Dunbar-Ortiz 2014).

Justice demands of Native Americans often stand in sharp contrast to global justice norms that have been narrowly framed in the context of multiculturalism and “normative individualism”—where justice is focused on state power and equalizing individual welfare ( Lightfoot 2016; Phillips 2019). Indigenous justice demands challenge this narrow view of individualized and “multicultural” justice, confronting the legitimacy of state power, institutions, and settler claims to formerly Indigenous lands. Indigenous demands for justice include land and collective rights, as well as holding accountable the repressive structures, institutions, and actors who infringe on the rights of Indigenous peoples ( Yashar 2005; Waziyatawin 2008; Dunbar-Ortiz 2014; Lightfoot 2016).

Today, Native people recognize that racism and discrimination are tools that reinforce settler colonialism. Leading up to the 2020 election, the global coronavirus pandemic and demands for justice in Black and Brown communities provided a setting for Native Americans to take political action and make strategic decisions about political leadership.

Native Americans and the Build-up to the 2020 Election

Preceding the 2020 election, a host of factors shaped how Native Americans engage in politics. Immediately after Donald Trump’s election, Native lands and cultural site protections produced direct conflicts between Native nations and the Trump administration. Four days after taking office, Trump signed a memorandum reversing course on the Keystone XL and Dakota Access pipelines, approving and expediting pipeline construction. The Obama administration had denied easements and called for energy developers to not disrupt Native lands and cultural sites for energy development. In his reversal, Trump called for an end to “horrible” and “cumbersome” environmental assessments, paving the way for the pipeline to be constructed by April 2017, in the face of Native American protest and disapproval ( Archambault 2016; Estes 2019; Estes and Dhillon 2019). The Bears Ears National Monument in Utah was also cut by 85 percent and protections for the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska were slashed, endangering sacred lands and practices of many Alaska Native communities. These acts demonstrated little regard for Native land and cultural rights and little commitment to consultation with Native Americans ( Fox et al. 2019; Pino 2021; Plumer and Fountain 2020).

Moreover, the COVID-19 global pandemic exposed the long-standing structural, health, and economic inequalities in Native American communities, making them vulnerable to infection and spread. Research has documented how the history of colonization and policy neglect by federal and state governments compounded the effects of COVID-19 on Native peoples ( Rodriguez-Lonebear et al. 2020; Foxworth et al. 2021). The Navajo Nation became the epicenter for COVID-19 in the United States, and by August 2020, CDC reports estimated that Native Americans were three times more likely to get COVID-19 than white Americans and five times more likely to be hospitalized compared to whites ( Centers for Disease Control and Prevention 2020; Raifman and Raifman 2020). In large part, these sobering outcomes were the result of federal policies that neglected the health of Native Americans, and a failure to live up to treaty agreements to provide Native Americans with healthcare. This neglect and injustice was a catalyst for Native American political engagement.

In addition to injustices related to land and public health, new opportunities emerged in the summer of 2020 for Native people to express their discontent over long-standing inequities and state violence. In May 2020, marches erupted across the nation as Black organizers and their allies took to the streets to demand justice for the murders of several African Americans at the hands of police, including Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, and George Floyd ( Smith and Warrior 1996; Blansett 2018). Native people in urban and rural communities staged and attended Black Lives Matter rallies to show support and solidarity for the toll of systemic racism and police violence on diverse communities ( Dombrowaski 2020; Oliver 2020; Native News Online 2020). Native Americans are keenly aware that the use of state violence against marginalized people is historic. In 1965, Native Americans formed the American Indian Movement in Minneapolis to combat police brutality, unlawful arrests, and other systemic issues facing Native Americans ( Deloria 1969; Nagel 1995; Friedler 2020). Still today, Native Americans are killed at higher rates in police encounters than other racial or ethnic groups, though this police violence receives less public attention ( Hansen 2017; McKosato 2018).

These varied issues signaled a growing discontent with the American political system among Native Americans. These new and long-standing inequities in the lives of Native people can stimulate political action, including decisions about which candidate to support or whether to attend a protest or demonstration. With this context, we lay out our theory of how justice concerns motivated Native American political decisions and actions in the 2020 election.

Native American Justice, Political Activity, and Vote Choice in the 2020 Election

Social justice demands for Native American rights have a powerful effect on mobilizing Native Americans, including their engagement in protest activity, and in shaping their political voting decisions. We believe these two outcomes, which we use as dependent variables in this research, are explicitly linked to social justice in the context of the 2020 election. In the 2020 election, individual candidate choice was motivated by social justice, especially for communities of color who sought to hold Trump accountable for racist and xenophobic rhetoric and policies ( MacWilliams 2016; Butt and Khalid 2018; Hooghe and Dassonneville 2018; Baker and Bader 2022). Moreover, mass mobilizations across the country in support of Black Lives Matter explicitly displayed that the act of protest was about social justice and change. Collectively, these outcomes give us a sense of 1) who Native American voters hold accountable for unjust actions affecting their communities and 2) how frustrations with the political system drive Native Americans to protest.

Discrimination has been a central concept in understanding the political behavior of racial and ethnic minorities. For many racial and ethnic minority groups, linked fate and group consciousness are activated by perceptions of injustice or discrimination and have been shown to motivate political action ( Dawson 1994; Tate 1994; Stokes 2003; Chong and Rogers 2005; Sanchez and Masuoka 2010; Masuoka and Junn 2013; Philpot 2017; Vargas, Sanchez, and Valdez 2017; Berry, Cepuran, and Garcia-Rios 2020). To date, there has been little research that can answer similar questions about Native Americans, but there is reason to expect a similar process for this population to that observed for Blacks, Latinos, and Asian Americans.

Most Americans do not believe that Native Americans experience high degrees of contemporary discrimination ( First Nations Development Institute 2018; Foxworth and Boulding 2021). However, Native Americans report experiencing higher levels of discrimination than other racial groups ( Findling et al. 2019). In a 2017 study of 342 Native Americans, over 50 percent of Native Americans cite personal experiences with discrimination when interacting with police, courts, and in the workplace ( Findling et al. 2019). Furthermore, the 2021 American COVID-19 Vaccine Poll reveals that 78 percent of Native Americans believe discrimination directed at their community remains a problem today, with many Native Americans reporting unfair treatment when attempting to get the healthcare they need ( African American Research Collaborative 2021).

There is evidence that exposure to discrimination and unfair treatment may be greater for Native Americans that live on or very near tribal lands. For example, hate crime data reveal that Native Americans are more likely to be a target of a hate crime in “border towns,” or rather towns that are close to Native American reservations ( United States Commission on Civil Rights 2015; Denetdale 2016; FBI 2018; Mathias 2019). According to Census data, roughly 22 percent of Native Americans live on Native American reservation or tribal government lands. The remaining Native American population either lives in close proximity to their reservation community, or in other urban or suburban areas. Given these residency and experiential trends in discrimination, we expect residential location will have an effect on vote choice and engagement in political protest. Specifically, Native Americans who live on or near a reservation will be more likely to cast a vote against Donald Trump and engage in protest.

Given the prevalence of discrimination faced by Native Americans, we expect that perceptions of worsening discrimination will influence Native American vote choice and engagement in protest politics. In part, this expectation is supported by research showing that the strength of Native American Democratic partisan attachment is motivated by discrimination experiences and racial identity ( Min and Savage 2014; Herrick and Mendez 2018). Similarly, linked fate and having a belief that Native Americans are oppressed has been linked to Democratic Party attachment among Native Americans ( Herrick and Mendez 2018). Therefore, we expect that Native Americans who believe discrimination has gotten worse from 2016 to 2020 will be more likely to vote against Trump and participate in a protest or demonstration.

Beyond being a significant public health crisis in many communities, COVID-19 has also been a significant social justice issue in Native communities. Native Americans were keenly aware that the suffering in their communities from the pandemic had its roots in nearly 250 years of federal Indian policy that neglected and disempowered Native nations. The lack of health infrastructure and ability to respond to the COVID-19 crisis was the result of treaty violations, breaches in federal trust responsibilities, and centuries-long policy neglect ( Finley 2021; Foxworth et al. 2021).

Given this, we expect that Native Americans who believe that COVID-19 is a highly salient issue in the 2020 election will be less willing to vote for Trump. This decision is motivated by the desire for political justice: to hold Trump accountable for the lack of federal response and the lack of prioritization for Native American communities during the pandemic ( Cancryn 2020). But for protest participation, we believe that COVID-19 can have varying effects because of the health risks associated with attending mass events. We expect that COVID-19 issue salience will keep people from participating in protests, as they were more concerned for their personal, family, and community safety—all of which are not deserving of the risk associated with the virus. Beyond COVID-19 salience, we believe that Native Americans who have greater COVID-19 exposure, including exposure within their personal networks, will be more likely to turn out to protest. Their anger from their own personal exposure, and having friends and loved ones exposed, will motivate a desire to advance change and justice, and a willingness to participate in collective protest.

In sum, we expect the motivation for social justice to operate through contextual political forces in 2020 and have an effect on Native American vote choice and protest participation. Living in a reservation community, perceptions that discrimination is getting worse for Native Americans, COVID-19 issue salience, and network exposure to COVID-19 should affect vote choice and protest participation because they advance justice in politically strategic ways. We explain how we test these hypotheses in the following section.

Data and Methods

We use data from the 2020 American Election Eve Poll. 2 This poll interviewed 15,200 Latino, Black, Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI), Native American, and white registered voters who had already voted, or were certain to vote, in the November 3, 2020, general election at the time of interview. Voters were identified and screened from voter files based on respondent registration date and vote history. In order to participate, respondents were questioned whether they had already voted, or were certain to vote in the election. The survey included 1,300 interviews with self-identified Native American voters, 3 the largest sample of 2020 Native American voters available. The overall margin of error for the survey was +/-0.8 percent. The margin of error specific to the Native American sample was +/-2.7 percent and +/-5.6 percent for the oversample of Native Americans in the state of Arizona (n = 300). Additional information about our analyses, including code to transform variables and conduct analyses, can be found in the Appendix.

Interviews were conducted through a combination of cell phone and landline telephone interviews with live callers as well as self-completed surveys online. Latino and AAPI voters were given an opportunity to complete their interview in their language of choice at the start of the interview. Languages available included English, Spanish, Mandarin, Cantonese, Korean, Vietnamese, Tagalog, and Hmong. Among Latinos, 31.9 percent of respondents completed interviews in Spanish, while among Asian Americans, 11.4 percent of respondents completed interviews in one of the available languages, with Mandarin (3.7 percent) and Vietnamese (3.4 percent) the most common. Respondents were randomly selected from statewide or national sample frames, giving all voters an equal opportunity to be selected to participate in the survey. Respondents were contacted by phone on either landlines or cell phones, or invited to participate online via text or email, from October 23 to November 2, 2020. Interviews averaged fifteen minutes in length by phone and nine minutes online.

We use vote choice and protest participation as dependent variables in our analysis. Vote choice is a binary measure that asked the following: In the election for President, [will/did] you vote for the [ROTATE: Democratic candidate Joe Biden, Republican candidate Donald Trump], or someone else? Individuals who reported voting or planning to vote for Trump were coded as a 1, and a vote for either Biden or a third-party candidate was coded as zero. As reflected in figure 1, 60 percent of Native American respondents reported voting or intending to vote for former Vice President Biden in 2020, with 35 percent indicating support for President Trump. Native American support for Biden is significantly higher than white voters but lower than all other racial and ethnic minorities in the dataset. This is consistent with results from the 2018 midterm election based on a similar survey conducted by the same survey firm ( Evans et al. 2019).

Vote choice by race in 2020 election. Rates of support by racial identification in the 2020 election. AA/PI is abbreviated for Asian American and Pacific Islander.

In addition to vote choice, we also use a protest participation measure from the survey that asked respondents the following: Did you take part in any of the following activities related to the 2020 election—attend a march or rally to support racial justice, or protest police brutality? Respondents who reported attending a march or a rally were coded as a 1 and all other respondents coded as 0. Eighteen percent of Native American respondents reported that they attended a march or rally, which is nearly identical to the overall average across all survey respondents.

To test the extent to which living on a reservation affects our outcomes of interest, we use an indicator to identify if the respondent lived on or very near a reservation or tribal government area. This question asked: Do you currently live on a designated Native American reservation or Tribal government area? The response options were: Yes, live on reservation or Tribal area; Live very near reservation, but not on Native American reservation; No, do not live on a reservation. If individuals’ responses were that they lived on a reservation and tribal area or lived near a reservation, responses were coded as 1 and all other responses as 0. Across the full Native American sample, 32 percent of Native American respondents reported living on or very near a reservation or tribal government area.

Additional primary explanatory variables in our analysis are perceptions of whether discrimination has become worse over the past four years. The perceived racial discrimination variable is operationalized using the following: Over the past four years, do you think racism and discrimination against [Native Americans/American Indians] has increased, stayed about the same, or decreased? This is a strong indicator of whether Native Americans feel that there has been a rise in anti-Native American sentiment during the Trump administration and allows us to test whether it affects Native American vote choice and political activity. Forty percent of the Native American respondents in the sample indicated that discrimination had increased over the course of the Trump administration, compared to only 10 percent who thought it had decreased or were unsure, and 50 percent who believed it had stayed the same.

Figure 2 provides a comparison of perceptions of racial discrimination across all major racial and ethnic groups. Interestingly, the majority of Native Americans chose the “about the same” response category, which is significantly higher than the other racial and ethnic groups in the sample. Forty percent of Native American respondents believed that discrimination had increased over the past four years, which is lower than all other groups, including whites. This should not be interpreted as an indication that Native Americans do not experience racial discrimination. 4 On the contrary, settler colonialism has resulted in severe trauma, thus it is not surprising that more Native Americans would perceive that discrimination against their community has stayed relatively stable, even during a racially charged Trump administration. In fact, given this history, it is more surprising that 40 percent of Native Americans believe that discrimination has become worse during the Trump administration.

Perceptions of discrimination by race. Distribution by race to the following question: “Over the past four years, has discrimination against [Native Americans/American Indians, etc.] stayed about the same or decreased?” AA/PI is abbreviated for Asian American and Pacific Islander.

We also estimate the direct impact of the coronavirus on Native American voters. Our measure is a COVID-19 proximal contact scale that combines responses from a battery of questions inquiring if the respondent or individuals in the respondent’s network have contracted the coronavirus or become ill due to the virus. This asked: Have you or a family member or friend contracted coronavirus or become ill due to the coronavirus? The response options are as follows, and respondents could choose all that applied to their situation: 0) the respondent did not know anyone personally who has had the virus, 1) had someone in their network who had the virus who lives outside the household, 2) had someone in their network who had the virus who lives inside the household, 3) had the virus themselves but no other people in their network have, and 4) the respondent personally contracted the virus and had someone inside and outside of their household who also had the virus. By accounting for the proximal impact of COVID-19 on Native Americans during an election year, when COVID-19 was a salient issue for all voters, we ensure that any findings specific to perceived discrimination are strong.

We also include two issue salience measures in our models, one for coronavirus salience and one for the salience of racial discrimination and social justice. Both these measures were based on the following survey question: Thinking about the 2020 election, what are the most important issues facing your community that our politicians should address? Respondents were provided a list of 19 policy issues and could choose any two options. The most commonly identified issue among all voters was the coronavirus pandemic, with 45 percent of Native American respondents making this one of their top two issues. Discrimination/social justice was the second most commonly selected salience response item, representing 23 percent of Native Americans.

In an effort to advance the knowledge of unique factors driving the ways in which Native Americans engage in the American political system, we account for respondent tribal affiliation. 5 Native nations across the country are diverse, and respondent tribal affiliation may have an effect on our outcomes of interest. For example, members of the Diné Nation may have unique attitudes regarding COVID-19 relief given that they have arguably been the community most impacted by the pandemic. To test if differences exist among Indigenous groups, we coded tribal affiliation. The most common tribal affiliation was Cherokee (21 percent), followed by Diné/Navajo (11 percent), which is consistent with both tribes being the largest in the United States based on tribal members. We include a measure to control for these tribal groups’ identification in our models, which is motivated by interesting differences across both groups in the sample. For both these measures, individuals who identified themselves as Navajo were coded as 1 and all others coded as 0, and the same methodology was used for individuals identifying as Cherokee.

Consistent with our expectations that tribal affiliation might be meaningfully associated with other variables of interest, respondents who identified as Diné/Navajo were most likely to report that they live on tribal lands at 68 percent and are more likely to be Democrat in their partisanship compared to the overall Native American sample (62 percent identify as Democrats). Respondents who identify as Cherokee are less likely to live on tribal lands or a reservation (17 percent live on tribal lands or a reservation), and are less likely to report as Democrats (37 percent). Given the limitations in survey data on Native Americans, these descriptive results from the survey’s weighted sample highlight that there are indeed significant differences across subgroups of the Native American population. 6

We control for a host of demographic factors, including education, age, and gender. We also control for partisanship, with Democrat and Independent/something else included in the model and Republican serving as the reference category. 7 Given the limited work that explores variation in partisanship with a national sample of Native Americans, we highlight some internal variation. Overall, 47 percent of Native Americans in the sample indicated they are Democrats compared to 23 percent who identified as Republican, and 25 percent identified as Independent. Among Native Americans, women are more likely to be Democrat (+10 percent) than men. Consistent with the overall electorate, Native Americans who live in urban areas are more likely to be Democrat than those who live in rural areas, as well as those who are college educated. 8

Logistic Regression Results

Was Native American vote choice and protest participation during the 2020 election driven by a desire to combat discrimination and promote equality and justice for their community? Given the categorical coding of the vote choice variables, we test our hypotheses using logistic regression models. Table 1 shows the results for vote choice. First, perceptions of racial discrimination and the issue salience of social and racial justice measures statistically correlate with Native American vote choice in 2020. This supports our argument that perceived racial injustice and discrimination directed toward Native Americans affected their lack of support for Trump’s reelection. The odds ratios associated with both factors (0.376 and 0.378, respectively) are nearly identical, indicating that the substantive impact for both perceived discrimination and believing that racial and social justice was the most important issue for politicians to address were similarly influential on vote choice during the 2020 election.

Determinates of vote choice for Donald Trump