By Ammon Baldomero
In October, attorney Jesse Franklin-Murdock filed a lawsuit against Kamehameha Schools on behalf of Students for Fair Admissions, a legal advocacy group aligned with the conservative political movement known as MAGA (Make America Great Again).
The suit claims that although Kamehameha is a private institution and receives no federal funds, its tuition and enrollment contracts fall under contract law which prohibits race-based admissions making Kamehameha’s preference for applicants of Hawaiian ancestry illegal.
Since Donald Trump descended Trump Tower’s golden escalator in 2015, support for the MAGA movement’s supreme leader has grown in Hawaiʻi.
From 2016 to 2024, votes for Trump increased in Hawaiʻi by 51% while in the legislature Republicans gained five seats in 2016 and 12 in 2024; the most since 2002.
Voter maps provide a clear picture of who supports him. While neighbor island voters voted democratic at the same rate as urban Oʻahu voters; in rural Oʻahu Trump had heavy support.
In West Oʻahu, Trump voters were the majority in Waipahu, ʻEwa Beach, Kapolei, Nānākuli, Māʻili, Waiʻanae, and Mākaha. In East Oʻahu, they were in Punaluʻu, Hauʻula, Lāʻie, and Kahuku. There’s also a small cluster in Kalihi.
As a private school, Kamehameha accepts students from every district. The system determines the number of admitted applicants based on the percentage of Native Hawaiians in each district. So, if an area has a high density of Hawaiians, it constitutes a higher percentage of Kamehameha’s student body.
With that said, the best indicator of Hawaiian population centers are Hawaiian homesteads – the approximately 200,000 acres set aside via the 1921 Hawaiian Homes Commission Act, a federal law intended to restore Native Hawaiians to their lands – now managed by the Department of Hawaiian Home Lands (DHHL). Presumably, a large number of Kamehameha students live on homestead lands.
And here lies the irony: if you overlaid the voter and homestead maps, you’d see that, in 2024, a large percentage of Native Hawaiians voted for Donald Trump – the man whose conservative legal comrades now seek to strip them of their dignity.
Let that sink in.
It is a case of a people voting against their own interests. But why would they do that?
You might say they couldn’t have seen this coming, which may be partly true. But surely they saw what we all saw: the threats to roll back environmental laws which will accelerate sea level rise and drown Hawaiʻi’s shores; cancellation of DEI programs which fund Hawaiian nonprofits and education programs; cancellation of grants which partly fund DHHL; and cuts to social services like tax credits, SNAP, Medicaid, and social security – of which Native Hawaiians represent a large percentage of Hawaiʻi’s recipients.
More recently, seeing our very own Republican lawmakers Brenton Awa of Kaʻaʻawa and Diamond Garcia of ʻEwa Beach travel to D.C. to try and advocate for Kamehameha – only to be stonewalled – says everything about how much MAGA insiders actually care.
Indeed, let this lawsuit be a lesson for Native Hawaiians.
Ammon Baldomero is a writer and former analyst at Bank of Hawai’i and Zions Bancorporation. He is an alumnus of ‘Iolani School and holds a Bachelor of Science in Economics from Brigham Young University. To read more, subscribe to his digital newsletter, “Hawaiian Luminary,” where he discusses Hawai’i’s politics, economy, and culture.
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