WASHINGTON — Democratic presidential candidates will descend on Iowa next week to do something that Native Americans say doesn’t happen enough: court their vote.
At least seven White House hopefuls have said they’ll attend a forum in Sioux City on Monday and Tuesday named for longtime Native American activist Frank LaMere, who died in June. Tribal leaders and citizens will talk with candidates about issues including health care, education and violence against National American women.
Several candidates attending the forum, including Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, Julian Castro and Marianne Williamson, have issued platforms dedicated to the needs of indigenous people. Marcella LeBeau, a 99-year-old registered Democrat and a citizen of the Two Kettles Band of the Lakota, said that’s a change from the past when politicians largely overlooked Native American issues.
“We’re like a third-world country,” she said. “No one really listens to us.”
Many Native Americans live in “hard-to-count” rural areas and are not reflected in the U.S. Census Bureau’s Current Population Survey, so the census cannot accurately measure their voter registration as it would for black, white, Asian and Hispanic citizens. Census estimates say Native Americans make up around 1.7% — or 5.3 million — of the U.S. population, and suggest that more than 3.7 million Native Americans are of voting age.
As more Native Americans gain access to the polls, they may be a powerful asset for candidates. Richard Witmer, a political scientist from Creighton University who specializes in American Indian politics and policy, said the Native American vote can swing a close national election.
“The Native vote is absolutely going to matter. It’s going to matter a lot,” Witmer said of next year’s race.
Candidates rarely court the Native American vote like they do other demographics, noted Nicole Willis, a citizen of the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla who lives in Seattle.
“It’s almost like a moral test of a candidate. Like, are you going to pay attention to this group that has traditionally been ignored?” said Willis, who was a Native American outreach adviser to President Barack Obama as well as a 2016 presidential adviser to Sanders.
Activists say tribal citizens still face barriers to voting that must be addressed.
Many Native Americans live on far-flung reservations without polling centers. Before Four Directions, a group promoting voting rights for Native Americans, sued for satellite offices on Nevada’s Pyramid Lake Paiute Tribe reservation in 2016, residents had to drive nearly 100 miles roundtrip just to vote, said Oliver “O.J.” Semans, co-founder of the forum and a citizen of South Dakota’s Rosebud Sioux Tribe.
Voter ID requirements are another hurdle. States such as North Dakota require voters to provide ID and a street address at the polls, so the many rural Natives with only a P.O. Box number have been barred from voting, Semans said.