Just 16 percent of people say Elizabeth Warren’s DNA test stunt improved their opinion of her.
A new Politico/Morning Consult poll confirms what many Americans have been thinking: why did Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) release a glossy video touting a DNA test that “confirmed” she was less than one percent Native American?
After months of taunts President Trump–who called Warren “Pocahontas” over allegations that she faked Native American heritage and minority status in the 1980s and 1990s to attain career success as a law school professor–Warren apparently wanted to put the issue to rest.
But her DNA test revealed her most recent Native American or South American ancestor was centuries ago, between 6 and 10 generations in the past. That means Warren has anywhere between 1/64 (1.5 percent) and 1/1024 (.09 percent) ancestry. The average white American has .18 percent native ancestry–potentially more than Warren.
Despite her DNA test showing Warren was, basically, a generic white American, the media buried the lede and took her side–claiming that she “proved” her claims were accurate.
This despite the fact that her claims also included a “family recipe,” plagiarized from The New York Times, that Warren had given to a Native American cookbook called “Pow Wow Chow,” where she identified herself as Cherokee–and the fact that she claimed her paternal grandparents discriminated against her mother for being Native American, forcing her parents to elope.
President Trump, who famously offered to donate $1 million to charity if Warren proved she was Native American, has said he can no longer “call her Pocahontas. She doesn’t qualify … I’ve been saying it for a long time. I’ve been saying it for a year and a half. I said, ‘I have more Indian blood than she has and I have none! I have none!'”
