Democrat Voter Who Questioned Warren’s Ancestry Claims Says Candidate Was ‘Pandering’

The Democrat voter who questioned Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s (D-MA) past claims of Native American heritage at a “Conversation with the Candidate” event in New Hampshire last week told Fox News’s Martha MacCallum Monday the presidential candidate was trying too hard to pander to her.

Elizabeth Radecic wondered how Warren could “overcome the bridge with voters” who feel uneasy about her past claims of Native American heritage, particularly using it to elevate herself in the academic realm. While Warren apologized and admitted she is “not a person of color” and “not a citizen of a tribe,” she started talking about affirmative action.

Radecic, a mother of black twins, said the presidential candidate was pandering instead of focusing on the heart of the question.

She explained:

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 told MacCallum she has a similar background to Warren, with a family narrative of Native American heritage. Despite that, Radecic said she never considered identifying as a minority, as Warren did.

“As someone who has a similar family narrative who had always heard that I had a Native grandparent, it never occurred to me that I should put that on an official form and try to represent myself as Native American,” she explained.

“The only reason that someone would do that is to try to get a leg up I can imagine,” she added.

Warren told the town hall audience her past claims of Native American heritage never played a significant role in her rise in academia.

“Like most people, my brothers and I learned about who we are from our mom and our dad. My family’s very important to me, and based on that, sometimes, decades ago, I identified that way,” Warren said.

“But nothing about the way I identified ever had anything to do with my academic career,” she continued.

Despite Warren’s attempt to minimize the significance of her past claims, the University of Pennsylvania Law School and Harvard Law School listed Warren as a minority faculty member, and she identified as an American Indian on her Texas Bar registration card:

The political fallout from Warren’s misleading claims rose to prominence last fall after the Massachusetts senator released the results of a DNA test, which estimated that she had anywhere from 1/64th to 1/1,024 Native American ancestry. Additionally, Stanford University professor Carlos D. Bustamante, who analyzed the results, found that Warren “shared DNA with residents of Colombia, Mexico, and Peru, not Native Americans who are members of tribes in the United States,” Breitbart News reported.