The Hopi Lands are situated across three mesas and stretch over 2,500 square miles in Northern Arizona. Within those boundaries, Hopi communities are centered around 12 villages that have been home to the Hopi since time immemorial.
Lorraine Coin has been on our team as a field organizer for Hopi since our program began in 2019 and has been working on the ground year-round ever since. In that time, voter turnout in raw numbers has very nearly doubled on Hopi. Lorraine has built an electorate that is sustainable that will continue to play an important part in keeping Arizona Blue. With Lorraine’s expert knowledge, the Hopi program expanded in both size and tactics in 2023. We began the Hopi listening tour, a first-of-its-kind program on Hopi; we visited multiple communities to listen to what voters had to say. We wanted to know what issues were most important to voters on Hopi and what solutions community members wanted from elected leaders. We discussed how powerful Indigenous voters are and how redistricting in 2020 had the goal of diluting the Native voting bloc. We talked about restoring the power of Native votes by getting more community members to the polls.
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With the listening tour, we have been able to build a team of volunteers who are ready to knock doors in their home villages. In 2024, we will have the first ever Hopi door-to-door canvass with volunteers from many villages knocking the doors of their friends and family members. This door-to-door canvass will focus on new voter registrations and voter tune-ups, which will ensure both that every voter is registered at their current address and that they have the ID they need to cast a ballot in Arizona, where we have very strict ID requirements for in person voting. The first training for these canvasses was February 15th, with 15 volunteers being trained on field skills.
In addition to canvasses, we are scheduling high traffic voter registration in the villages of Hopi. Our deeply embedded team of organizers and volunteers know better than anyone how to engage voters and empower them to get to the polls. These volunteers include our Family Votes Matriarchs who have been critical to getting out the vote since 2021. Our relational organizers are stepping up to work more broadly in their communities. WIth three elections in Arizona in 2024, we have our work cut out to educate voters. Our Presidential Preference Election in March, the August Primary, and the General Election in November each have different rules for which voters cast ballots; our team are experts in dispelling confusion and getting voters to the polls.
These efforts on Hopi are critical to turning out the votes that will provide the margin of victory for President Joe Biden, Senate candidate Ruben Gallego, and Congressional Candidate and former Navajo Nation President Jonathan Nez. Knowing our communities is the biggest strength of the Northeast Arizona Native Democrats. Our efforts to educate and grow the electorate on Hopi are intensive and require investment that other campaigns do not provide. We are laying the foundation for Get Out The Vote efforts this autumn. We are building a reliable electorate who will vote in this and all upcoming elections, an electorate that builds political power on sovereign lands and protects democracy for the entire nation.
To get this work done, we pay our organizers and contractors a living wage, and we also ensure that the cost of travel does not fall on the shoulders of our team members.
We invest our funds in:
We can fulfill these needs because of the generosity of the Daily Kos Community. You have faith in our program and our tactics, your trust us and our work, and are willing to chip in. We are so grateful to all of you for helping us build a program on Hopi that will win elections. It is because of supporters like you that Lorraine Coin is able to engage volunteers and part-time contractors to do the work that so desperately needs to be done.
Missa Foy
Program Director Northeast Arizona Native Democrats
Chair Navajo County Democrats
www.navajocountydemocrats.org
neaznativedemocrats.org (project of Navajo County Democrats)
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