Sheehey announces his candidacy for state representative
Retired LANL scientist, Air Force vet vies for District 43 House seat
A retired Los Alamos National Laboratory scientist and Air Force veteran who has served on the Los Alamos County Council for five years has announced he is running for state Rep. Stephanie Garcia Richard’s District 43 House seat.
Pete Sheehey, 65, a Democrat like Garcia Richard, is the first candidate to announce in the district, which in recent election cycles has been a battleground as Democrats and Republicans compete for control of the House.
Garcia Richard recently announced that she is running for state land commissioner rather than seeking re-election to the House seat.
Sheehey served in the Air Force between 1976 and 1979, and he moved to Los Alamos in 1986 to work at the lab. He took an early retirement in 2012.
In 2010, he ran unsuccessfully in the Democratic primary against Garcia Richard for the House seat, who lost a close general election that year to Republican Jeannette Wallace of Los Alamos.
In 2012, Garcia Richard ran again for the Legislature and won. Sheehey successfully ran that year for the County Council. He was re-elected in 2016.
Prior to serving on the council, he served for four years on the Los Alamos County Planning and Zoning Commission.
Since the 1990s, Sheehey has been a member of the Los Alamos Committee on Arms Control and International Security, a bipartisan group that studies arms control and advocates for “sound treaties and policies that increase our national security.”
“I make sure to listen to different voices, and do my best to explain what I know about the issues,” Sheehey said in a statement announcing his candidacy. “That’s how we can find common priorities for the investments that will move our community and state forward.
“We have had to deal with tight budgets in my time on the Council,” he added, “but that has not stopped us from going ahead with the most important projects: infrastructure to offer better places to live and work, support for our public schools, and recreational amenities.”
Los Alamos was solidly Republican for decades. But sometime before the 2016 elec-
tion, the GOP lost its voter registration edge over Democrats in Los Alamos County. According to the latest registration numbers at the Secretary of State’s Office, 38 percent of the voters in the county were Democrats as of November, while 34 percent were Republicans. Voters who declined to state a party when registering made up 24 percent of voters there.
As for District 43, which also includes parts of Santa Fe, Rio Arriba and Sandoval counties, Democrats have an edge over Republicans, 43 percent to 31 percent.
The district was represented for 20 years by Wallace, who seemed to win by healthy margins until her final race in 2010, when she barely edged out Garcia Richard. Wallace died in 2011, and Garcia Richard came back to defeat Republican Jim Hall, who Republican Gov. Susana Martinez appointed to fill out Wallace’s term.
While Republicans made it a priority to try to take the seat back from Garcia Richard in 2014, she was re-elected by a 13 percent margin over her GOP opponent. Last year, she won by nearly 18 percentage points over the Republican candidate.