Battle for Haaland’s seat
Democrats have advantage in Albuquerque area, but race is being hard-fought
Melanie Stansbury got her first taste of celebrity at a small coffee shop in Old Town Albuquerque earlier this month.
It happened while Stansbury, who until recently was a relatively unknown Democratic state legislator, was meeting with a Washington Post political reporter for an interview about her bid for New Mexico’s 1st Congressional District seat in a special election June 1.
“While I was waiting for coffee, a woman started yelling, ‘That’s Melanie Stansbury! That’s Melanie Stansbury!’ ” she recalled of being recognized at the Blackbird Coffeehouse. “That’s the first time that’s ever happened.”
Three years ago, Stansbury was just another member of the state House of Representatives. Not many people outside the Democratic Party — or even inside — had heard of Stansbury until 2018, when she unseated a seven-term Republican incumbent in a conservative-leaning district in Albuquerque’s Northeast Heights.
But in recent months, Stansbury has become the darling of the Democratic Party and elevated her political profile by leaps and bounds as she campaigns to replace former U.S. Rep. Deb Haaland, who vacated the congressional seat to serve as President Joe Biden’s interior secretary.
“Her ascension in politics has been extremely rapid, and I think it’s attributable to her good performance in the Legislature,” House Speaker Brian Egolf, D-Santa Fe, said about Stansbury. “But also, she has one of the absolute best campaign work ethics and an ability to organize people to do effective field work, campaigning door to door, things like that.”
Egolf recalled being impressed when he and Haaland attended Stansbury’s last canvassing event just days before the November 2018 general election.
“I’d never seen anything like it,” he said. “Deb and I walked in, and your jaw dropped. She had 50 people there, something like that, to go knock on doors just for her campaign. They said they’d knocked on something like 12,000 doors over the previous week.”
In just a few years, Democratic Party Chairwoman Jessica Velasquez wrote in an email, Stansbury has proven that she’s able to organize, engage voters and deliver for her constituents.
“She has become a powerhouse in Democratic politics because of her hard work and leadership on key issues like climate change, food and water security, and economic inequality,” Velasquez wrote. “She’s known for being a strong Democrat and has made it clear that she will work alongside President Biden in Washington, D.C., to advance his agenda.”
Campaign heats up
Stansbury is vying for the seat against Republican state Sen. Mark Moores, Libertarian Chris Manning and Aubrey Dunn, a former Republican and state land commissioner who is running as an independent. Two write-in candidates also have been certified.
Stansbury and Moores have emerged as the most visible candidates in the race.
Moores has been in elected office a little longer than Stansbury and may have a slight edge in name recognition. The three-term state senator and vocal Republican Party leader is a former football lineman for the University of New Mexico. He also worked for former Republican U.S. Rep. Steve Schiff, who represented the district for nearly a decade.
But the odds could be against Moores.
In New Mexico’s 1st Congressional District, Democrats now make up 47 percent of registered voters while Republicans account for 28 percent.
“Just the character of the district would suggest that [Stansbury is] going in as the front-runner, but it’s a special election, and those often don’t draw a lot of people, so turnout is going to be really important,” University of New Mexico political science professor Lonna Atkeson said.
Atkeson said she didn’t know whether Moores had more name recognition than Stansbury but that they are “definitely different candidates.”
The race, Atkeson noted, appears to be more high profile than when Haaland won reelection against Republican challenger Michelle Garcia Holmes in November.
“It seems like maybe there’s a greater election there than there was in the fall,” she said. “I see campaign commercials for [Moores]. I don’t think I ever saw campaign commercials with Garcia Holmes.”
Moores agreed that “it’s all about turnout” and said he’s undeterred by the fact that Democrats have had control of the seat since 2009 after being in Republican hands for some 40 years.
“We’re going to get it back,” he said, calling Stansbury “just a radical progressive” who is out of touch with New Mexico, particularly the central part of the state.
As he did during a recent televised debate, Moores linked Stansbury to the so-called BREATHE Act, a bill that would “divest federal resources from incarceration and policing” and “invest in new, non-punitive, non-carceral approaches to community safety that lead states to shrink their criminal-legal systems and center the protection of Black lives,” according to breatheact.org.
“She said that Congress must pass this bill,” Moores said. “That kind of differential between someone who has long New Mexico roots, someone who’s a proud New Mexican — I played football at UNM, my family’s from Northern New Mexico — and someone who is just out of step with New Mexico, Central New Mexico particularly, that’s how we’re going to win this. We’re going to contrast ourselves with her.”
Moores said his plan to get out the vote includes everything from door-to-door campaigning, which he described as “wearing out the leather on the shoes,” to phone banking and television advertising.
According to the latest campaign finance reports, Moores has a bigger war chest than Stansbury.
Moores, however, has collected only about $51,500 in contributions, while Stansbury reported raising nearly $204,000. But Moores has more money because he loaned his campaign $200,000.
“The reason I had to loan my campaign is because she was illegally raising campaign money during this [legislative] session,” Moores charged.
“There’s a prohibition period for legislators during the session raising money,” he said. “She’s going to say that because it’s a federal race that that law doesn’t apply, but it is unethical for a legislator to be asking lobbyists for campaign donations during the legislative session.”
Moores said he plans to file an ethics complaint against Stansbury.
After 40 years, Democrats win control
In addition to turning up the heat on the campaign, Stansbury and Moores have also both upped their visibility in recent weeks, part of an effort to get out the vote and raise their profiles among voters.
Albuquerque-based pollster Brian Sanderoff said neither Stansbury nor Moores was a “household name” prior to this campaign.
“They were just local, state legislators,” he said. “Sure, Mark Moores has been in office for a longer period of time, but still,
you just don’t get well known in the Albuquerque area by being a state legislator, and neither of them are, so we’ve got two [Northeast] Heights legislators who are hardly known prior to this campaign running for Congress.”
Sanderoff noted the district, which includes most of Bernalillo County, all of Torrance County and parts of Sandoval, Santa Fe and Valencia counties, was once a Republican stronghold but has been leaning in favor of Democrats over the last decade or so.
Republican Manuel Lujan Jr. held the seat from 1969 to 1989, followed by Steve Schiff from 1989 to 1998 and then Heather Wilson from 1998 to 2009.
“For decades, this was a Republican seat,” Sanderoff said.
When Wilson retired to run for the U.S. Senate, a Democrat, Martin Heinrich, now a U.S. senator, won the seat in 2008. Two other Democrats followed: Michelle Lujan Grisham, now New Mexico’s governor, and Haaland, the first Native American Cabinet secretary.
“The seat shifted to Democratic control, and the Albuquerque area has made a significant shift to voting more Democratic in recent elections,” Sanderoff said, adding that seven legislative seats in the Heights and Westside flipped from Republican to Democrat in 2018 and remained in Democratic control in 2020.
“The question now is: Will the pendulum swing back?” he said.
“Will this race become a referendum on Democratic control in Santa Fe and in Washington now that the Democrats control both the legislative and executive branches in both places? Will people reward [Stansbury] by saying we like the direction of the country? Will some people think that this country is moving too far to the left?” Sanderoff added. “I mean, time will tell. But, you know, this is an uphill political battle for a Republican given what’s happened in the last two election cycles in the Albuquerque area.”
‘Politics isn’t rocket science’
Stansbury was born in Farmington and raised in Albuquerque since she was about 4 years old. She said she grew up mostly in the North Valley and Westside of Albuquerque.
“I grew up working for our small family businesses and then bussing tables nights and weekends,” she said.
After graduating from Cibola High School, Stansbury attended Saint Mary’s College in Moraga, Calif., on a full scholarship.
“I went and got a science degree in ecology and natural science and then came home,” said Stansbury, who said she has loved science and being outside since she was a kid.
After working as a science educator for the Natural History Museum in Albuquerque — a
job that allowed her to travel around the state — Stansbury got an internship at the White House Council on Environmental Quality.
“I was there for six months and then I ended up getting hired as a staffer in the [White House] Office of Management and Budget,” she said, adding she worked on water, tribal and climate issues, among others.
In 2015, she went to work at the U.S. Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources.
“That’s where I really learned kind of the art and the craft of legislating and how you put together really good solid policy solutions and bipartisan legislation that can get across the finish line,” she said.
It was that job, Stansbury said, that ultimately got her thinking about the potential of running for public office.
Stansbury moved back to New Mexico in 2017 to be closer to her family and started her own consulting practice working on water issues. That same year, she participated in Emerge New Mexico, an organization that recruits Democratic women to run for office.
The following year, she launched a campaign for a House seat against Republican incumbent Rep. Jimmie Hall. Stansbury said she had phone banked and “done a little bit of canvassing” for a couple of different campaigns, but her run against Hall was her first real foray into politics.
“I’ll tell you, not a single person in the state, it seemed like, believed we could win that race,” she said. “It had never had a Democrat representing it before, so it was, at best, a long shot.”
Stansbury ended up winning in an upset.
“Not only did we win it,” she said, “we won it by seven points.”
When a reporter called her the next day to ask how she’d won the race, she told him she had reached out to 40,000 people, either through phone or by knocking on their doors, and asked them what they cared about and listened to what they said.
“I often say that politics isn’t rocket science,” Stansbury said. “It’s just a lot of hard work.”
Stansbury, who has been campaigning hard for months, including seeking the nomination from the Democratic Central Committee, said the June 1 special election will come down to voter turnout.
Stansbury said running for Congress is an experience unlike any before.
“It’s a totally unique life experience,” she said. “But at the end of the day, I’m just a regular old New Mexican who grew up here, and nothing’s changed as far as that goes. I’m just a hometown girl from Albuquerque who has stepped up to serve our community.”