GOP offers area voters long-shot choices in 2020
One piece of good news in this year’s general election cycle is that, around much of northern New Mexico, there are fewer uncontested races.
It’s been years, maybe even decades, since there have been so many Republican candidates for Santa Fe-focused legislative seats. Regardless of our various political viewpoints, we should all welcome this advance toward diversity on election ballots. Democracy is better when there’s more than one candidate or ideology to choose from.
“Obviously, competitive elections inform more voters, it gets them thinking about these things,” Lonna Atkeson, a political science professor at the University of New Mexico, told the Journal North recently.
Still, the candidates who are part of the expanded GOP slate in northern New Mexico are generally massive underdogs with little financial support. A couple of the candidates acknowledge they have little chance of winning in a deep blue region.
“I’m not confident,” Leighton Cornish, the Republican trying to unseat veteran Democratic state Sen. Nancy Rodriguez of Santa Fe, said about his election chances.
The GOP’s effort to break through might improve in coming years if its nominees try moving somewhat toward the middle of the political spectrum.
For example, it might seem feasible that Jay Groseclose, a civil engineer who is the Republican candidate for northern Santa Fe County’s House District 46, might have a chance against first-term Democratic incumbent Andrea Romero.
She hasn’t been able to shake off a scandal over misuse of public funds by a coalition of local governments when she was its director. As a legislator, Romero sponsored a bizarre bill with the unconstitutional purpose of requiring publishers to take down “inaccurate, irrelevant, inadequate or excessive content” about people, including, apparently, public officials like her. The bill was quickly dropped after reporters posted articles about it, which some may have considered excessive or irrelevant.
But Groseclose adheres so strongly to conservative positions in his responses in a Journal Q&A that he may have little chance among Santa Fe County voters — for example, Groseclose not only opposes repealing New Mexico’s old antiabortion law, which could be enforced if Roe v. Wade is overturned by the U.S. Supreme Court, but also he’s actually for “strengthening” the statute, which as it stands would ban abortion except in limited circumstances. He also says, regarding COVID-19 restrictions, that “we never authorized the governor to suspend fundamental liberties.”
At this point, the Journal North recommends that voters mostly stick with the Democrats who give the area strong representation at the Roundhouse — the leaders in both the Senate and the House, Peter Wirth and Brian Egolf, respectively, are from Santa Fe (and both are on the ballot this year).
Here are a couple of races that warrant a closer look:
■ House District 42, a Taos-area seat. There are two good candidates here — environmental activist and Democrat Kristina Ortez, and Republican Linda Calhoun, a real estate broker, gift shop owner and mayor of Red River since 2006.
A Harvard grad with a master’s degree from UNM, Ortez has been executive director of the Taos Land Trust for six years. She said she took over the Trust at a time of crisis, guiding it to a rebound. While an environmentalist, she says she would support a moratorium on fracking “only if constitutionally enforceable and with a comprehensive plan that addresses economic concerns for communities dependent on fossil fuel extraction AND plans for diversification of our state’s economy.”
Calhoun is campaigning as a non-partisan candidate and has some experience to back up that idea — she was one of two Republicans Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham chose for her transition team. Calhoun’s policy positions are solidly Republican, but she is open to legalizing recreational marijuana with a local option for municipalities, calls for affordable housing initiatives, supports better funding for schools, and calls for protecting water and other natural resources. She is the kind of candidate the GOP should be putting before the voters more regularly.
■ House District 43, centered on Los Alamos. New Mexico’s Atomic City used to be considered reliably Republican, but it started to drift Democratic in recent years until, in 2018, Los Alamos County went all blue, with no exceptions, from the top to the bottom of the ballot.
Democratic Rep. Christine Chandler took over the District 43 seat after current state Land Commissioner Stephanie Garcia Richard broke a GOP stranglehold on the position in 2012. A retired Los Alamos National Laboratory lawyer, Chandler has been a smart asset for the community.
Her opponent this time is David Hampton, a 19-year LANL employee working in scheduling, budgeting and performance analysis.
This race is pretty much a textbook case of a progressive Democrat against a conservative Republican. Hampton makes no bones about his stances — he promotes first and upfront on his web page his opposition to abortion and doing away with the electoral college, and his support for 2nd Amendment gun rights.
Chandler supports legalizing recreational marijuana with strict controls, is in favor of repealing the state’s old anti-abortion law and is for taking a small percentage of the interest on the state Land Grant Permanent Fund for use on early education programs.
So, this race will be another test of whether Los Alamos is becoming reliably Democratic.
Any win for Republicans in the numerous contested races in north-central New Mexico will be an upset. But it’s good that the GOP is at least trying this year.