Sublime

In the 1992 presidential election, there were thirty-two “battleground” or “swing” states, those considered winnable by either party. By 2000, there were twenty-two. By 2004, fourteen. And by 2020, there were only eight.

Excluding Natives from the census was symbolically significant, sustaining the fantasy that settlers were taming an uninhabited wilderness. But statistically, it was less important. In 1890 those page-963 Indians and Alaskans made up only 0.57 percent of the population, the consequence of the dwindling of Native populations and the explosion of Ang