Merritt Hamilton: New Mexico is neither a blue nor a red state
I am doing a couple interviews this week to provide a Republican perspective on New Mexico politics in 2024. That might seem amusing to some of you who perceive New Mexico as a Democratic state. But as I gathered my thoughts ahead of these interviews, I realized that for the last 50 years until 2018, New Mexico has never been an entirely Democrat or Republican state, but always a mix.
At its heart, I think it still is.
As of March 2024, the Secretary of State’s voter registration numbers attest to this fact. No one party has a majority of voters. 43.3% of voters are registered as Democrats, 31.1% as Republicans, and 23.5% as independent or as we call it in New Mexico “decline to state.” The remaining 2% are registered with another, smaller party.
For many years, Republicans held many or most statewide offices, while Democrats controlled the legislature and the governor’s office flipped around except for a long streak in the 1970s and 1980s when it was solidly Democrat. During the 1980s and 1990s, the majority of our Congressional delegation was Republican: we sent one Republican and one Democrat Senator and two Republican and one Democrat members of the House to Washington. Clearly, no one was voting a straight party ticket.
We kept this balance largely until 2018. I was covering Election Night that year for NM PBS – KNME TV, and we saw race after race being called for Democrat candidates. One of my co-correspondents called it a “blue wave”; I replied it was a “blue tsunami.”
Just four years before, Republicans took control of the state House of Representatives for the first time in history. That night in 2018, the GOP lost nearly every legislative seat in Albuquerque, and nearly every statewide race, including governor’s race and the 2nd Congressional District. What happened?
The short version of the story is that MAGA and far-right extremism don’t win elections in New Mexico. Elections in New Mexico are won in the middle, as our mixed slate of elected officials for the last five decades would attest. In 2018, the state Republican Party made a decided shift to the right and made then-President Trump a key element of the platform. RPNM also leaned into the emerging rural-urban divide, focusing efforts in the southern part of the state and rural counties in general.
Thing is, you can’t win statewide races without Albuquerque. The numbers just don’t support you. Undaunted, the state GOP doubled down on this strategy in 2020 and 2022 with similar results. Republican voter registration has not changed significantly since 2018, either. The message isn’t working.
The Democrats don’t exactly have a mandate, either. They simply have a more palatable, if not ideal platform. And because we do not allow independents to vote in our primaries, more extreme candidates from both parties are able to be more successful, since they do not have to come to the center to earn independent votes.
(Taxpayer funded elections should not bar entire categories of registered voters from participating in those elections. This is “one person, one vote” stuff, dear reader.)
The most interesting outcome of the elimination of the Republican Party as a credible political threat in New Mexico is the fracturing of the Democratic Party into different factions. A growing progressive movement among the Democrats has met growing resistance from “pro-business” Democrats.
This year that resistance is taking PAC form with the announcement by Jeff Apodaca that The New Mexico Project, his anti-progressive political action committee, has raised close to $1 million to “amplify Latino and moderate Democrat voices.” Apodaca is the son of former Governor Jerry Apodaca and a well-known businessman. Bottom line, Apodaca’s goal is to push the Democratic caucus back to the center.
The New Mexico Project website notes that Latinos in NM are underserved in the Legislature and underrepresented in voter registration with more than 60% of the Latino population not registered to vote. If Apodaca’s PAC moves the needle on this latter statistic, the impact on the 2024 election will be considerable, given our majority-minority demographics.
I don’t see much change from RPNM in the 2024 campaign season, so the best chance New Mexicans have of seeing their elected officials move back to the center will be Apodaca’s and other like-minded Democrats’ efforts. Opening primaries to independent voters failed again this year in the Legislature.
I’d like to see some Republican wins in the state this year to be sure. Lacking a robust challenger in the state House and Senate, the Democratic caucus has failed to bring forward meaningful legislative packages to improve how New Mexicans live, work and raise their families. Yet, Republicans remain fixated on ideological litmus tests and telling us how awful Democrats are instead of offering real solutions to the state’s problems that would grow our numbers of voters and help our candidates win. As a result, Republicans have little power to add to the conversation.
Red or blue – New Mexicans agree on one thing: we want better government and are willing to vote outside party lines to get it. Party chairs and candidates should remember this.
Merritt Hamilton Allen is a PR executive and former Navy officer. She appeared regularly as a panelist on NM PBS and is a frequent guest on News Radio KKOB. A Republican, she lives amicably with her Democratic husband north of I-40 where they run one head of dog, and two of cat. She can be reached at news.ind.merritt@gmail.com.
This article originally appeared on Las Cruces Sun-News: Merritt Hamilton: New Mexico is neither a blue nor a red state
