McDonald: A look at NM's political landscape

Let’s take a look at New Mexico’s political landscape, post election.

I know, I know, you’re sick of politics, but this state still has a lot going on. We just had a one-day special session to spend a bunch of federal relief money, and soon enough we’ll find out if we’re going to keep our governor or get a new one in time for the upcoming 60-day legislative session in January.

In this year’s election, Democrats kept their tight grip on the state’s executive, legislative and judicial branches. But the Republicans did win a big race in Congressional District 2, so there’s life in this state’s Grand Old Party after all.

Not that the Republicans had much of a say in the fly-by special session last week. Lawmakers either showed up or “zoomed” in, so to speak, to pass a pandemic relief package totaling $330 million. It looked the way Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham and her Democratic allies wanted it to look, and it’s going to where they wanted it to go.

The federal CARES Act funds will go in a variety of directions: $100 million will go into small business grants; $120 million will go into one-time $1,200 payments to about 100,000 unemployed New Mexicans who qualify; $15 million is earmarked for emergency housing assistance; $5 million goes into emergency food bank services; $5 million more for direct assistance to low-income New Mexicans; and $10 million for contact tracing, testing and vaccine distribution. The rest of the funds, or about $75 million, will go into the administration of all these services.

That’s a lot of goodwill coming down the pike, and the Democrats will surely be the beneficiaries. Republicans, on the other hand, have little say-so, will get no credit, but they will do their best to heap copious amounts of blame on Lujan Grisham for anything and everything that goes wrong.

If you ask me, Lujan Grisham’s biggest mistake has been in her one-size-fits-all approach to the state’s COVID outbreaks, but that’s something she’s attempting to rectify with her new “Red to Green” approach to reopening. That’s where all the state’s counties are color-coded, based on 8 cases per 100,000 inhabitants and a 5% positivity rate in a county’s COVID-19 test results over 14-days. Your county is green if you’re under 8 cases per 100,000 people and have a test positivity rate of less than 5%; yellow if you’re under one of those data points but not the other; and red if you're over in both measurements.

The problem right now is that all but Los Alamos County are red.

Clearly this is a reopening plan. We’ll see how it works in the weeks ahead. We’ll have a clearer picture of its success — and the success of the upcoming vaccine rollout — by the time the 2021 legislative session convenes on Jan. 19, when other issues like legalizing recreational marijuana will also take the stage.

But you can bet COVID and its economic impact will be on top of the legislative agenda, perhaps to the point of pushing out other less-pressing issues. I’m as sure as I’ve always been that recreational marijuana will eventually be legalized in New Mexico, but whether that happens in 2021 remains an open question.

A bigger uncertainty, however, is whether Lujan Grisham will still be governor on Jan. 19, opening day for the legislative session. If she accepts a position in President Biden’s administration — speculation I’ve read as of this writing is that she’s in the running for secretary of Health and Human Services or the Department of the Interior — she’ll be leaving the keys to the governor’s mansion to Lt. Gov. Howie Morales, a state senator for the decade prior to his successful run for lieutenant governor in 2018.

Tom McDonald is editor of the New Mexico Community News Exchange. Contact him at:

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