A New Hampshire voter who confronted Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D., Mass.) about her past claims of Native American ancestry said Monday she felt pandered to by the 2020 candidate's response.
Elizabeth Radecic revealed to Warren last week she had two black children, who had already faced racism at the age of 3, and that she supported affirmative action. Radecic said she struggled with Warren's decision earlier in her career to identify her race as American Indian and wondered how she could overcome voters' questions about her honesty.
Warren gave the same response she has used since first apologizing for her claims in February, saying she shouldn't have done it, wasn't a tribal citizen, but also hadn't benefitted professionally from her claims. She went on to speak about policies concerning housing and affirmative action, to Radecic's chagrin.
"She apologized, she admitted that she had made a mistake but then she went on to go into more information about housing and affirmative action, which at that point I felt like she was starting to pander to me, instead of giving me an honest answer about where she had made a mistake," Radecic said on the Fox News program The Story.
Radecic told host Martha MacCallum she felt Warren had taken advantage of the affirmative action system. Like Warren, Radecic grew up hearing stories about having Native American ancestry, but said it never occurred to her to put it as her race on an official form.
"The only reason that someone would do that is to try get a leg up, I can imagine," she said.
She said Warren wasn't in her top tier of preferred Democrats, saying she was looking more toward "moderate" candidates such as Sen. Cory Booker (D., N.J.), Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D., N.Y.), and South Bend mayor Pete Buttigieg (D).
Warren's presidential announcement in February was overshadowed by reporting that she identified her race as American Indian on a State Bar of Texas registration card in 1986. She took heat for releasing a DNA test last fall that purported to prove her longtime claims but showed she could be as little as 1/1,024th Native American.
She was criticized for going to such lengths to win a dispute with President Donald Trump, who mockingly calls her "Pocahontas" for her claims of Native American ancestry.