Heinrich seeks bipartisan appeal
Senator charts progressive positions while casting himself as a problem-solver
There are not many voters in Pie Town. In fact, there are not many voters in all of Catron County — 2,865 as of late last month. And most of them are Republicans.
So, Martin Heinrich, a freshman Democratic senator, kept it short.
Speaking at the community’s annual Pie Festival earlier this fall, Heinrich talked about water rights, hunting and keeping the local post office open.
In all, he spoke for about one minute.
There was no mention of President Donald Trump or Judge Brett Kavanaugh, who had just gone through his first round of confirmation hearings for a seat on the U.S. Supreme Court. Heinrich certainly made no mention of his two opponents.
For the candidate of a party that seems to be banking on an anti-Trump backlash to win congressional races around the country, it seemed an unlikely approach just a couple of months ahead of Election Day. Why not throw a few barbs? To be sure, Heinrich was speaking to the audience in front of him. But it seemed to reflect something about his entire campaign so far.
“Trump will take care of the backlash by himself,” Heinrich said. “People want something proactive.”
The senator had just worked his way through a line of residents, shaking hands, posing for photos and receiving plenty of thanks for his work on the post office issue — a big deal in a town of a little more than 100 people. Now, he was headed to get some pie because what else do you do at the pie festival? A folk band was playing and kids ran around the town’s park.
For a moment, the strategy all seemed to make sense. You could not get much further from Washington politics.
Heinrich, 47, has spent much of his first term playing up his pragmatic side. Often looking as if he just walked out of an REI catalogue, he can fluently speak about hunting and fishing in the backcountry. But he also has shifted further to the left on a number of issues, from marijuana to gun control.
So, while he has sought to be viewed as one of the hook-and-bullet crowd, he is increasingly signing on to the priorities of progressive Democrats. Has he not moved to the left? “I’m not the kind of elected official who makes big movements one way or another,” Heinrich said. “I think
about things over time. I watch what’s going on. And I make a decision based on what I can. The facts and the data.”
Heinrich can come off as trying to offer a little something for nearly everybody. It was a tried and true formula for men like Domenici, Bingaman, Montoya: U.S. senators from New Mexico who were familiar and familial enough to be known by their first names — Pete, Jeff and Joe — as much as their voting records.
In this day and age, however, that kind of one-size-fits-many governance may not be enough for anyone.
Trump already has tilted the ideological bent of the U.S. Supreme Court, kneecapped the Affordable Care Act and slashed corporate tax rates in what Heinrich argues was a giveaway to the rich. His opponents are an unabashed conservative, Republican Mick Rich, and Libertarian Gary Johnson, a former governor who is blunt that the federal government needs to overhaul major programs like Medicare.
For all his talk about bipartisanship, the biggest thing Heinrich has to offer his base has nothing to do with joining arms with Republicans and everything to do with being the one candidate in this race who could be a fairly reliable bulwark against them.
The way here
Heinrich was born in Fallon, Nev., and grew up in Cole Camp, Mo., where his dad worked as an electric company lineman and his mom as a factory worker.
He graduated from the University of Missouri-Columbia with a degree in engineering. After college, he settled in New Mexico with his girlfriend, Julie Hicks. They married in 1998 and Heinrich ended up running the Cottonwood Gulch Foundation, a nonprofit group promoting environmental education. In past interviews, he has chalked up the move to the state’s scenery and culture. But the city would also prove to be fertile ground for a political career.
In 2003, he won a seat on the Albuquerque City Council and cut a direct path to Congress; he won a seat representing New Mexico’s 1st Congressional District in 2008. And four years after that, he won a race for U.S. Senate.
New Mexico was arguably more of a purple state at that time than it is now. After all, it was not too far removed from having had a Republican senator. And Gov. Susana Martinez would handily win a second term in 2014.
But jump ahead to 2018 and the political landscape has shifted, with New Mexico becoming bluer, the Democratic Party defining itself roughly through its opposition to Trump, and gridlock becoming the status quo in Congress.
Depending on whom you ask, Heinrich’s approach to the times has either been deliberate and thoughtful or overly cautious and coldly calculated. Take guns, for example. Heinrich hedged on the issue when he first got to the U.S. Senate. He had an A rating from the National Rifle Association while in the U.S. House. And the senator has angled to keep sportsmen in his base.
But he publicly split with the NRA in recent years, quitting the organization and coming out in support of a new ban on so-called assault weapons as well as high-capacity magazines. Then, there is marijuana. Heinrich was noncommittal about legalizing the drug when first elected. But he took to Twitter earlier this year to support legalization.
Johnson’s supporters argue Heinrich has been behind the curve on issues like drugs. This dovetails with the oft-cited point that Heinrich’s family has moved to the Washington, D.C.-area, where his wife works at a public relations consulting firm. Rich accuses Heinrich of having abandoned the state. Is he just a politician? Others say all of this is just Heinrich’s style.
“I think Martin kind of tows a pragmatic line,” said Garrett VeneKlasen, a supporter who was recently a candidate for land commissioner and got to know the senator about 10 years ago while fishing.
Indeed, Heinrich has seemed most at home talking about issues that appealed to more than Democratic voters, like public lands. He pushed for the creation of the Organ Mountains-Desert Peaks National Monument as well as the Río Grande del Norte National Monument and has backed the expansion of wilderness areas from the Columbine-Hondo to the Sabinoso.
Meanwhile, he has touted bipartisan efforts to change how the federal government pays for fighting wildfires and pushed with Republicans to save Amtrak’s Southwest Chief route. In 2014, Heinrich even traveled to a small island in the Pacific Ocean with Arizona Republican Sen. Jeff Flake for a Discovery Channel show called Rival Survival. It was a reality television version of bipartisanship.
None of this is to say Heinrich has shrunk from being a Democrat. He has supported the Affordable Care Act and emerged as a leading critic of the National Security Agency. His guest at the president’s State of the Union address this year was New Mexico’s teacher of the year, who also happened to have been brought to the country as an undocumented immigrant when she was a child.
And this year, it is bread-and-butter Democratic issues, not bipartisan legislation, that he seems to be betting will be the key to his re-election.
With polls showing his two opponents splitting many of the same voters and Johnson, a two-time presidential candidate, performing well among independents, Heinrich’s best path to re-election may be rallying the party faithful.
In his television ads (he is the only candidate on air at the moment), Heinrich pledges to protect Medicare and Social Security, contrasting himself to Johnson. He has signed on to legislation such as Sen. Bernie Sanders’ “Medicare for All” bill. And he opposed Kavanaugh’s nomination from the start.
Still, Heinrich is a pragmatist or a realist or perhaps more simply put, a shrewd politician.
Ask him, for example, what would be the best way to extend health insurance to everyone.
“I’m not that doctrinaire about how you get there,” he said.
Instead, Heinrich suggested the country should probably expand on programs it already has.
“I do think if you’re going to build a program and you have to bring the public along. The best thing you can do is to build on programs that already exist,” he said. “Expansions to either Medicare or Medicaid, I think, are the right way to get there.”
Or, take Heinrich’s vote to confirm Ryan Zinke as Secretary of the Interior. As might have been expected, Zinke has infuriated environmentalists, no small part of the Democratic Party’s base.
But Heinrich defends his vote, pointing out the Trump administration did not cut the size of two national monuments in New Mexico that it had put under review. And it stopped dragging its feet on a land deal that expanded the Sabinoso Wilderness after he went horseback riding with Zinke at the site in San Miguel County.
“I don’t regret it,” Heinrich said of his vote to confirm Zinke. “I don’t think I would have the relationship that I have with him if I hadn’t. I know he would have gotten confirmed. And I worry as to how those two monuments and Sabinoso would have turned out if I hadn’t been able to press my case.”
Some could argue that if ever there were a moment to go at the other side with everything you have got, this would be it. In a recent interview, Heinrich ticks off a list of the Republicans he sometimes worked with on legislation. Flake is leaving, as is Bob Corker of Tennessee. Dean Heller of Nevada may be on the way out, too.
If voters don’t want compromises and deal-makers these days as much as they want crusaders, zealots and evangelists, it begs the question where Heinrich fits in the Trump era.
That is not how Heinrich reads the moment, at least not in New Mexico. Certainly not in Pie Town.
The local fire chief had just stopped to chat with Heinrich about the post office and raising some money for a new playground. A slide behind the two men bent precariously as one child after another descended.
Heinrich the pragmatist, Heinrich the engineer, Heinrich the politician, took stock of the scene.
“People are hungry for optimism right now,” he said. “What have we done well? What can we build on? How do we diversify and how we do move this state forward? I wanted to run a campaign based on the places I can have an impact on.”