Arizona Native Vote 2024 Wrap Up: The Road Ahead
Happy Holidays & Happy New Year! From our team to yours.
Our work and strategy from 2002 to today has been built with our communities and voters in mind and always at the forefront. For the 2024 year, Arizona Native Vote had 22,000 voter contacts. This amount of voter contacts for a small grassroots team is incredibly important.
These voter contacts are people we called, who came to an event, visited with us, helped us ‘Triple the Vote’ when we asked them to call or text three family members and friends to get them to vote, and more. Our small and mighty team of less than 20 people did this. This is extraordinary for just kicking off our field team program in May 2023 with just four Firekeepers. Hopi and Navajo matriarchs like Adeline Adams, Retha Letsoma, Maria Calamity, and Lucy Ben.
The story gets more extraordinary. Our data team has been looking at what happened in the field with voting. Here is one great data point. If you were a voter who didn't vote in 2020, but you had a conversation with an Arizona Native Vote staff member, you were 20% more likely to vote in this election. Compare that with the average person who didn't vote in 2020, only about a third of them voted this year. That’s good, but if they had a conversation with an Arizona Native Vote staffer that was up to 50% more likely.
There were three groups of voters we focused on: people who didn't vote in 2020, new people who just registered, and influencers, people who vote all the time. And we measure across sovereign land precincts in our region. Meaning we track the precincts that are actually on tribal lands like the Navajo Nation, Hopi, and White Mountain Apache.
So, if you were a voter in our region who didn't vote in 2020, but you had a conversation with Landis or Kaia in Times Square-White Mountain Apache or you met up with Adeline and Retha Polacca one day, or maybe you were at a goat roping event, or you got some of that amazing blue corn frybread from Lucy, and visited with Teena, and Maria at the roadside stand at Pinon Junction, you were more likely to vote.
This despite the many barriers to voting in rural and tribal Arizona communities. This means that our models is the antidote. This is what makes people feel empowered to vote. Our team being present in our communities regularly and year round is what works. Having Indigenous led field programs, staff, hiring and training, investing locally makes all the difference. And that difference is huge. A twenty percent boost is ridiculously high.
