Two Democrats to seek Lujan Grisham’s seat
Both attribute run to president’s win
The race to claim Michelle Lujan Grisham’s seat in Congress has officially started, with two Democratic candidates announcing their run on Thursday.
No Republicans have entered the race, though it is still early for candidates to be announcing their campaigns, a fact both Pat Davis and Antoinette Sedillo Lopez acknowledged with their announcements.
Both candidates also heavily emphasized their decision to run in response to President Donald Trump’s win last year and the actions of his administration since January.
“Since the last election, we know that tens of thousands of New Mexicans and millions of American have gotten reengaged in politics because they’re scared of what they have seen happens when we sit on the sidelines or stay at home,” Davis said in his formal news conference announcement Thursday morning.
Sedillo Lopez sent out an email Thursday morning saying “the narrow-minded and discriminatory policies of the Trump Administration were a major motivation” in her decision to run for Congress.
Both are longtime activists in Albuquerque.
Davis moved to New Mexico in 2004 to work as a police officer at the University of New Mexico, then started advocating for “New Mexicans who felt like the system wasn’t working for them,” founding and running one of the state’s most active progressive groups, ProgressNow New Mexico. He won a seat on the Albuquerque City Council in 2015.
He said the political “fights we’ve been leading here are the fights we need leaders” to fight
in Washington.
“I’m ready to take on this challenge and to lead that fight,” he said.
Sedillo Lopez was raised south of Albuquerque in Los Chavez. Though she went to law school in California, she has since lived in New Mexico, spending 27 years as professor at the University of New Mexico School of Law, including as associate dean for clinical affairs with a focus on social justice and civil rights issues.
Most recently, she was executive director of Enlace Comunitario, a nonprofit organization supporting immigrant women who have experienced domestic violence.
“I love our community, and I love our state. When I see what is going on in Washington, I just see our Constitution being ignored,” she said Thursday. “This is the highest and best use of my knowledge, my skills, my values — to go to Washington and fight for our Constitution and our state and our community.”
She said Trump is “creating an oligarchy where the 1 percent get richer and richer and the rest of us don’t.”
The Albuquerque-based congressional seat could attract a large field of candidates — both Democrats and Republicans — because Lujan Grisham, a Democrat, plans to vacate the seat and has announced she is running for governor.