Raise your hand if you expected the racial demographic that would be most supportive of Donald Trump in the 2024 presidential election to be… American Indians. (That’s the terminology in the exit poll, don’t blame me if you prefer “Native American.”)
According to the Edison Research exit poll, 65 percent of American Indians voted for Trump, while 57 percent of whites voted for Trump.
Granted, American Indians make up just one percent of the respondents in the exit poll and it’s possible that the small sample size is throwing the percentages off a bit, but the exit poll results come from “interviews of 22,914 randomly selected voters as they exited voting places across the country on Nov. 5; as well as from early in-person voting locations and through live telephone, text-to-web or by email.” So while it’s possible Trump’s support in this demographic was lower than two-thirds… it wouldn’t be that much lower.
Why did American Indians break so heavily in favor of Trump? Democrats may begin a lot of events and statements with “land acknowledgements,” but they’re not so supportive of letting America Indians do what they want on their own land. The Biden administration repeatedly put up regulatory roadblocks to American Indian tribes that rely on fossil fuel production for revenues. Tribes facing some of the worst poverty in the country – lacking indoor plumbing and electricity – are residing on land with fortunes worth of oil and natural gas, coal reserves, uranium, as well as solar and wind. Not only is the Biden administration blocking development of fossil fuels on Indian land, it’s ironically trying to ram through wind and solar projects over some objections from the American Indian community.
At the tail end of the Obama administration, the Bureau of Indian Affairs informed the Confederated Tribes of the Chehalis Reservation, in southwestern Washington State, that federal law prohibits the building of a distillery on tribal grounds. Congress and President Trump legalized distilleries on reservations back in 2019.
It appears an increasing number of American Indians thought sovereignty meant, you know, sovereignty, and thus they could make their own decisions about what they wanted to do on their own land. When the Biden administration proved an intransigent obstacle to tribal ambitions, American Indians started looking around for better options. As giant signs say at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian, “great nations keep their word.”
It’s worth noting that in the key state of North Carolina, Trump pledged to award full federal recognition to the Lumbee Tribe in that state. On Election Day, that community came out for Trump:
As polls closed Tuesday night, tribal members in Robeson County had spoken: Trump, a Republican, won 63.3 percent of the vote in the county, where the Lumbee tribe has its headquarters, according to unofficial results from the state Board of Elections.
Trump increased his win in Robeson by more than 4 points compared to 2020, making the county one of “the biggest movers toward Trump” in the state, Chris Cooper, a political science professor at Western Carolina University, said on X.
Trump won the county by 12,661 votes; he won North Carolina overall by about 189,000 votes.