Libertarian candidate: No nanny needed

PORTALES — She had never voted in her life prior to 2016, and on Friday morning Ginger Grider went to the Roosevelt County Courthouse and marked another milestone. This time she’s on the ballot, for a position she fully does not expect to win.

It’s been less than two months since Grider became the Libertarian Party’s candidate for New Mexico secretary of state — the latest development in a transformation the past few years from a lifelong conservative Republican to a medical cannabis advocate and local chair of the first third-party to register in the county.

As a member too of the state’s central committee for Libertarians, she entered the race challenging incumbent Democrat Maggie Toulouse Oliver and Republican Gavin Clarkson while running on a platform completely reversed from what she might have championed a decade before.

“I was a registered Republican for 28 years, die hard. I would have thought that straight-ticket voting, that would have been the greatest thing in the world,” she said. “Why would anybody do anything but vote Republican till the end, and make it as convenient as possible?”

But plenty has changed for Grider since her days supporting the GOP, and part of her effort to oppose the recently reintroduced straight-ticket option is inspired by her own political awakening.

“If people were kind of forced, because they didn’t have straight-party ticket voting, they’d have to research (the individual candidates),” she said of the option that allows voters to cast ballots uniformly for candidates in a specific party. “It seems like a Libertarian would be like, ‘Hey, the more options you have the better.’ But it encourages laziness and it encourages stupidity. It encourages something that is very much everything that is wrong with this country.”

Grider joined the Libertarian Party in 2016, but her conversion started sooner than that — at least four years earlier, when she caught her youngest daughter smoking a joint in the bathroom.

“I called the police and I had her arrested,” she told The News. “I was hardcore, like, crazy, Republican, god-warrior, insane woman. The police showed up and they were like, ‘Ma’am, really?” and I said absolutely.

“We went to juvenile court, and they were like, ‘Are you serious?’ and I said, ‘Absolutely, she will follow the law of the land, she will be a good person.’”

At the recommendation of a juvenile probation officer, the high school sophomore wrote a letter to her parents explaining that she forayed into marijuana use because she was in pain and it helped, Grider said. Her daughter had been diagnosed with lupus in middle school, and Grider herself lives with autoimmune conditions.

“And she asked that her parents stop being so stupid and do some research,” Grider said. “And I think that was the beginning.”

Grider began self-educating on cannabis’ therapeutic effects, and soon set to re-evaluate much more of what she thought she’d known.

“What I had believed about cannabis and what I had been told by my party ... I found out I had been so deeply lied to on something that was so very important,” she said. “So I wondered what else I’d been lied to about, and man, oh man, is there a giant can of worms there. And it made me re-evaluate every single solitary thought that I believed.”

Her position now is for the decriminalization of marijuana and amnesty for non-violent drug offenders. She also has major issues with the prison-industrial complex, though she maintains that horrible deeds should be punished accordingly.

More broadly, she aspires to reduce government’s meddling in human lives as much as possible, a classic Libertarian ideal.

“Allowing people to participate in this market, and that it be the freest market possible is important to me,” she said. “None of us need the government to be our nanny and protect us from ourselves. ... As Americans, we have the right to ruin our lives if we want to. And I’m not saying drugs ruin people’s lives. Cannabis has saved my life.”

But she doesn’t expect to effect those major changes as secretary of state, nor does she expect to win the position. Her hope is that her candidacy can be a spring board for additional advocacy for civic engagement and equal access to the polls. And in the closing weeks before the Nov. 6 election she is doing what she can to bat for her fellow statewide Libertarian candidate peers, speaking at a forum Thursday night in Ranchvale on behalf of Gary Johnson and A. Blair Dunn’s bids for U.S. Senate and New Mexico attorney general, respectively.

“I had never voted in any election my entire life (prior to 2016),” she said. “A couple of interviewers were like, ‘You’re running for secretary of state and you’ve never voted?’ And yes. I’m honest. I don’t give very candidate-like interviews.”

Grider believes there is too much of an us-versus-them mentality in American politics, whereas Libertarians pride themselves on total individuality — a concept that in its purest form can make for difficult politicking.

However, the numbers so far do show a modest distance opening from major parties in eastern New Mexico. According to data as of Wednesday, Roosevelt County logged combined absentee and early voting totals from four registered Libertarians, not including Grider, but also 63 votes from those who declined to state a party. Registered Republicans and Democrats logged 187 and 228 votes, respectively.

The contrast is more pronounced in Curry County, where there were seven votes from Libertarians, more than 1,200 from Republicans, more than 500 from Democrats and 125 from those who declined to state.

Clovis City Commissioner and outgoing Curry County Republican Party Chair Rube Render told The News he didn’t believe Libertarians were yet a major party in the state. Any candidates that could be considered true Libertarians are simply “not electable,” Render said.

“I think the Libertarians, if they were wise, would align themselves with the Republican Party,” he said.