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Shirley Sneve
ICT
With 14 of the 22 Arizona tribes located in this hotly contested region, the Native vote may be the tipping point for former Navajo Nation President Jonathan Nez to win the election bid next week for the U.S. House of Representatives. He is up against Republican incumbent Eli Crane.
District 2 makes up 60 percent of the land in Arizona. Redistricting in 2020 changed it to a largely red voter base.
Jordan James Harvill, the program director for Advance Native Political Leadership, says it will be an uphill battle, but with hard work to get out the Native vote, Nez may find victory.
“There’s 129,000 unregistered Native voters or unregistered voters in the district. A large section of that is Native voters,” Harvill, Cherokee and Choctaw, said in a Sept. 27 interview.
All across the district, Indigenous get-out-the-vote workers have been working hard to get as many people as possible to register to vote.
It appears to be working, as many polls are showing Nez inching closer to a win over Crane.
“My opponent was hand-picked by former President (Donald) Trump to run for office two years ago because of the gerrymandering and the redistricting that occurred here. And it moved a little bit to the Republican side,” Nez said.
Harvill agrees that the 2020 redistricting tipped the district to red.
“After redistricting post 2020, what we saw is that the district got significant geographies added to it that diluted the Native voting population and it shifted pretty far to the right. I think there’s a deeper story to tell about what that looks like, though. And so for the purposes of this race, I think Jonathan Nez is going to have a really uphill battle and he’s going to invest really deeply in Indian Country to make sure that he has a pathway to victory,” Harvill said. “I also think that as a state, Arizona is home to some of longest legacies of voter suppression against Native peoples historically. And so it’s a big deal to have our first person who may make it across the finish line and join our other members in Congress.”
Noble Predictive Insights for Inside Elections and Politico show the race tied at 42 percent each, while the Cook Political Report shows Crane with a slight edge of six points.
Nez said he wants to work across the aisle for Arizonans.
“It was pretty nice back in the day when Republicans and Independents and Democrats worked together. And maybe we need to go back to working together and push back this extremism, this division,” Nez said. “And I think this is a very important election that we need to be engaged in to make sure that our future is bright and democracy is protected, not just for us now, but as we say in Indian Country, seven generations and beyond.”
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