House District 46
Romero, who has no Republican opposition, won primary but faces fellow Democrat and write-in candidate Nordquist
Democratic nominee, write-in challenger face off in race marked by controversy.
Under normal circumstances, Democrat Andrea Romero would have coasted to victory in the November general election.
With no opposition from Republicans or any other party, Romero seemed to be a shoo-in for a seat in the state House of Representatives after ousting threeterm incumbent Rep. Carl Trujillo in the June primary, a nasty and bruising slug fest.
But for Romero, a 31-year-old Stanford University graduate who is making her first bid for elective office, nothing about the race for Santa Fe County’s House District 46 has been normal.
Though Romero clinched her party’s nomination, she incensed and alienated a faction of the district so much that she drew another Democrat as a write-in candidate.
Romero’s challenger, Los Alamos National Laboratory scientist Heather Nordquist, said, “I think that Andrea is clearly educated, and she’s articulate. I understand why people support her and wanted to support her. I also believe that her Achilles’ heel is really in her reaction to criticism.”
As the former executive director of the federal and local governmentfunded Regional Coalition of LANL Communities, Romero became a target of public scorn earlier this year over lavish spending, which included purchases of expensive booze and Major League Baseball tickets for coalition-sponsored events.
When a community education and advocacy group that Nordquist helped found discovered the inappropriate spending, which violated not only the coalition’s own travel policy but state law, Romero asked the coalition’s board to launch an investigation into Nordquist and another LANL employee who is a member of the advocacy group.
Nordquist said she was shocked by Romero’s response.
“I honestly thought because she did have a campaign manager and she had people around her who were there to advise her that … she would say, ‘Oops. My bad. I didn’t understand,’ and that she would write a check for the things in question and that it would all be over,” Nordquist said.
“A week later is when she wrote this letter saying, ‘None of this is my fault and oh by the way, can you please investigate Heather and [Beverly Duran Cash] for looking at public information?’ I was really stunned by that move. Of all the things that happened in this whole saga, the retaliation is the one that had my jaw dropped,” Nordquist said.
Romero has tearfully apologized for using bad judgment during her tenure as the coalition’s executive director, saying she had followed a
long-running reimbursement process for travel expenses and relied on Los Alamos County, which serves as the coalition’s fiscal agent, and the coalition’s treasurer to review and approve the expenses.
When the advocacy group disclosed the improper spending as she was running against Trujillo in the Democratic primary, Romero said she believed it was a politically motivated move meant to discredit her and the coalition.
Nordquist, Duran Cash and other members of the group, Northern New Mexicans Protecting Land, Water and Rights — better known as NNMProtects — were strong supporters of Trujillo.
In a recent interview, Romero said she asked for an investigation into whether Nordquist and Duran Cash had filed the proper paperwork and followed other relevant procedures with the lab, disclosing their membership with an outside organization, based on advice at the time.
The idea, Romero said, was “just to make sure that there were no stones unturned about what the motivations were.”
“Looking back, perhaps I would have done things differently,” she said. But Romero isn’t looking back. She said voters are ready to move past the controversy that clouded her campaign in the primary. She took “full responsibility” for her actions at the coalition, Romero said, and she, like voters, is ready to “move on and move forward.”
“I think that’s what voters of House District 46 really care about, is what can we do going forward, what changes would we like to make in our state and where our focus is, and that’s in education, economic development, community public health,” Romero said. “That’s what I believe is the major concern of our district, and that’s where I’m committed to truly bringing in leadership and change into the Legislature.”
To some extent, Romero is already talking like a winner.
While she continues to campaign, from knocking on doors to holding fundraisers, she said she is “getting all of our plans in order come January.”
Romero also said she’s been meeting with “potential new colleagues” in the Legislature and “really focusing in on a lot of the sort of critical components we hope to achieve come January.”
Romero, though, insists she isn’t taking a challenge from Nordquist for granted.
“We take no chances in this political climate,” Romero said. “We continue the hard work of connecting with folks. We don’t take any chances until we know what the results are on Nov. 6.”
Nordquist, 44, is in for a hard fight,
though she tries to minimize the challenge of being a write-in candidate.
“It’s one extra step,” she said. “It’s not like giving blood or anything. You fill in a bubble, and you write my name. I found that most people are willing to do that.”
Romero’s campaign has tried to paint Nordquist as out of step with the progressive Democratic values of the district, especially after her campaign treasurer, Martha Trujillo, who is Carl Trujillo’s aunt, appeared in a recent online ad in which Democrats criticized the more progressive arm of the party. The ad was funded by a group with ties to Republican oil and gas executive Harvey Yates.
The video, Nordquist said, reflects that some “norteños” are feeling left out of the Democratic Party.
“I believe that’s what the people in the video were trying to voice,” said Nordquist, who didn’t appear in the ad. “Now, how it was edited and how it was messaged is a product of who created it, without a doubt, but you need to separate the messenger from the message. The message is very much real.”
Nordquist, who grew up in El Rancho with a Hispanic mother who is native to the area and a white father from Missouri, said the reason she got involved in the Democratic Party is because people in more rural areas were being ignored.
“I’m a progressive. I’m pro-choice. I want people to have living wages. I want people to be able to go to school. I want to improve education,” she said. “Of course, I want all these things, but these people are interested in water and acequias. They’re interested in how to solve the opioid problem and the crime problem, and they’re not being spoken to.”
House District 46, which stretches from the north side of the city of Santa Fe to the more rural Northern New Mexico communities of Nambé and Chimayó, is like two districts, Nordquist said.
“You have a rural, northern part of the district and then you have the part that’s in the city,” she said. “And they couldn’t be more different. I think that any candidate trying to win this seat is going to face the issue of how do I appeal to both these worlds.” Romero sees it differently. “A lot of focus has been on a ruralurban divide, and I truly don’t see it that way,” she said. “When we talk about education, when we talk about jobs, when we talk about community health, when we talk about gun safety and we talk about women’s reproductive health rights, these are all common goals throughout the district and have no bearing on urban and rural.
“These are values that everyone shares,” she said, “and these are things that voters are looking for to be enacted in our Legislature. … That has nothing to do with geography and any specific issues that have to do with geography, such as acequias and tribal issues, we will address.”
Nordquist said she had considered running for political office and decided to run against Romero because “competition is good” and “keeps us on our toes.”
Amadeo “A.J.” Ortiz, an independent candidate who also tried to mount a campaign against Romero, failed to survive a legal challenge by a Romero supporter to the signatures on his nominating petition.
“Pretty soon after the primary, I felt like someone should run against her, not necessarily me,” Nordquist said. “I felt that there was a lot of minimizing of what had gone on in the regional coalition. At the very least, it showed some pretty significant lapses of judgment, and it really bothered me that someone wouldn’t have to lift a finger from then to November.”
Nordquist, who calls herself “puro norteña,” said she doesn’t talk much about Romero on the campaign trail but tells voters about what makes her a better candidate, including her work experience and advocacy work.
“My message to voters is about what I believe I have to offer,” she said. “It’s not about her and any perceived mistakes that I think she made. That’s a fairly lame campaign stump, so I really have avoided it as much as possible.”