In Wisconsin, Native American vote may have helped Biden top Trump in 2020 election

Green Bay Press-Gazette

GREEN BAY - One key to the slim, unofficial victory for the Biden campaign in Wisconsin may have been the Native American vote.

As of Friday, Joe Biden held a lead of about 21,000 votes, or less than 1%, with 99% of the votes counted in the state, and the Associated Press had already called Biden the winner.

American Indians/Alaska Natives make up 1.2% of the state's population, or about 70,000 people, according to the U.S. Census 2019 estimate.

But Brandon Yellowbird Stevens, vice chairman for Oneida Nation and election analyst, said that population number does not include people who had marked they are another race along with American Indian and said there are about 71,000 Native Americans of voting age in Wisconsin.

Stevens, who endorsed Biden for president, said it is not yet determined how much of an exact percentage Biden won the Native American vote by in Wisconsin, but points to Menominee County as a bellwether.

The county’s borders are congruent with the Menominee reservation, and its population is nearly 90% tribal.

In this election, President Donald Trump garnered about 18% of the votes, or 278, in Menominee County, while Biden took 82%, or 1,303.

Biden also won Bayfield County in far northern Wisconsin with 6,155 votes to 4,615 votes for Trump.

The Red Cliff Ojibwe tribal nation is in Bayfield County and is the county’s largest employer, according to the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction.

Stevens said voter turnout among Native Americans in Wisconsin appears to be much larger in this presidential election than the last one because the first choice for many in 2016 was Bernie Sanders.

He pointed to seven Wisconsin counties Biden won this year as having large Native American populations.

Biden also apparently won other crucial states where there are large Native American populations, such as Minnesota, Michigan and Arizona, but Stevens said Native American voters should not be considered a monolith.

The vice president of Navajo Nation, for example, with most of its lands in Arizona, had endorsed Trump for president.

Both the Trump and Biden campaigns had made efforts to address Indigenous people’s issues in the months leading up to the election.

Trump created the Operation Lady Justice Task Force in July to address the epidemic of murdered and missing Indigenous women with its first office opened in Minnesota.

But supporters and organizers of the recently created Wisconsin task force on the same issue had questioned if the Minnesota office would also serve Wisconsin and noted it was only staffed by one person.

In early October, the Biden campaign released its plan for working with tribal nations and immediately included endorsements from tribal leaders in Wisconsin, including Stevens and Stockbridge-Munsee Band of Mohican Indians President Shannon Holsey.

The Trump campaign released its own plan for working with tribal nations later that month, but did not include immediate endorsements from local tribal leaders.

“I think Biden reached out sooner,” Stevens said.

He said Biden released a 15-page comprehensive plan with goals that can be measured for accountability.

In contrast, Stevens said Trump’s three-page plan included a lot of ideology that sounded good, but there was “not a lot to grasp.”

Stevens said the lesson is that any campaign, whether presidential or during a mid-term, needs to reach out to and consult with tribes early on because the Native American vote needs to be taken seriously, especially in a swing state like Wisconsin, which has 10 electoral college votes.

Frank Vaisvilas is a Report For America corps member based at the Green Bay Press-Gazette covering Native American issues in Wisconsin. He can be reached at 920-228-0437 or fvaisvilas@gannett.com, or on Twitter at @vaisvilas_frank. Please consider supporting journalism that informs our democracy with a tax-deductible gift to this reporting effort at GreenBayPressGazette.com/RFA.

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