AP journalists Rodrigo Abd and Megan Janetsky set out to tell the unique story of voters who don’t often make the evening news: residents of the vast Navajo Nation in Arizona.
Since President Joe Biden won Arizona by 10,500 votes in 2020, both political parties have made a new effort to win Native American’s votes. The team wanted to talk to voters and unpack the deep distrust and resentment many Native voters have toward politicians.
Besides simmering frustrations stemming from lack of access to running water, inflation and high unemployment, the skepticism also harkens back to decades of voter suppression and other abuses, along with massive logistical hurdles to voting.
Abd shot hundreds of pictures of people and landscapes, and produced a photo essay telling the story of vast open space of the Navajo Nation. Janetsky wrote the story and teamed up with Abd on shooting video, produced by Allen Breed. Their reporting took them on an hours-long hike down a canyon to reach 156 voters in the remote Havasupai tribe, to cities, to rural areas following a pro-Trump goat herder (who named a goat after Janetsky).
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