Incumbent challenged
Longtime legislator faces tough challenge in House District 28
Since being elected to his state House seat in 2004, Jimmie Hall has generally had smooth rides to re-election.
In fact, Hall has been unopposed during the last three election cycles and last faced a general election challenge in 2010.
But the seven-term Albuquerque Republican is facing a stiff challenge this year from Democrat Melanie Stansbury, a 39-year-old who’s making her first run for elected office.
Stansbury has outraised Hall by a nearly 2-to-1 ratio in the House District 28 race and is part of a national wave of young female candidates.
A natural resources expert who returned to the state after working for years in Washington, D.C., Stansbury said that if elected, she would push to expand the state’s public campaign finance system to include legislative races.
She also said many voters in the district feel that their voices haven’t been heard.
“People really want to see meaningful change in New Mexico, because they love it here,” Stansbury said.
Hall, former co-chairman of the Legislative Finance Committee, says he’s willing to work with Democrats to find consensus.
In recent years, he has pushed
for legislation to make assault or battery against social workers with the Children, Youth and Families Department a new crime, and this fall he called for a special legislative session focused on child well-being issues. Gov. Susana Martinez has not shown any indication that she plans to call such a session.
Hall also accused Stansbury of recently moving to the district and seeking to replace the state’s oil and gas industry with wind, solar and other clean energy sources.
“There’s no way clean energy can replace $1.2 billion in new money,” he said, referring to a revenue uptick that’s been driven by surging oil production in southeastern New Mexico.
In response, Stansbury said that she is not opposed to the oil and gas industry but that an “all of the above” approach that puts a greater emphasis on alternative energy could help strengthen the state’s economy.
House District 28 covers much of the Sandia foothills on the eastern edge of Albuquerque. District voters narrowly favored Hillary Clinton over Donald Trump in the 2016 election, though former Gov. Gary Johnson, a Republican-turned Libertarian, got more than 12 percent of the vote, according to the online Daily Kos news site.
The race between Hall and Stansbury has been featured in an article — by the online Center for Public Integrity — that was published on the cover of USA Today and the Albuquerque Journal about out-of-state fundraising in local races.
As of earlier this month, Stansbury had raised $144,639, including donations from the political arms of national labor unions, and reported spending about $47,000. Her campaign has declined donations from corporate-backed political committees.
Meanwhile, Hall has reported raising $73,937, including contributions from several out-ofstate oil and gas companies, and spending roughly $29,000.