Voters in 25 states will have the opportunity to elect or reelect an Indigenous candidate to public office this year.
At least 170 Native American, Native Hawaiians, and Native Alaskans are on ballots this fall, an all-time high, according to a database collected by the group Advance Native Political Leadership and Indian Country Today, an independent nonprofit news organization covering Indigenous news. The group has been tracking Indigenous candidates dating back to 2016, from school boards all the way to the U.S. Congress.
Still, organizers and others say more work needs to be done to have representation that is proportional to national population sizes.
Advance Native Political Leadership has identified 347 current Native elected officials — less than 0.1% of some 519,000 elected offices nationwide. The organization estimates that number would have to be 17,000 to achieve parity based on the Native proportion of the U.S. population, which is about 3%.
“The most ground that we've gained has been at the state level,” said Elise Blasingame, an Osage Nation scholar in residence at the Advance Native Political Leadership, and an independent researcher at the University of Georgia focusing on the impact of Native representation on publicly elected offices.
Blasingame said that between 1993 and 2023, there has been a 300% increase, to about 80, in the number of state legislators alone who self-identify as Native American.
“Local efforts have tremendous power, not only in agenda-setting, but then showing other districts what can be done,” Blasingame said.
Read more about the causes and effects of this increase in representation.
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