Serving Clovis, Portales and the Surrounding Communities
Serving Clovis, Portales and the Surrounding Communities
Let’s be honest about the hypocrisy coming out of both political parties when it comes to gerrymandering. Both sides do it when given the opportunity and both sides decry the other side for doing it — all depending only on who’s in power at the moment the maps get redrawn.
If you want a definition for “gerrymander,” here’s Merriam-Webster Dictionary’s: “to divide or arrange (a territorial unit) into election districts in a way that gives one political party an unfair advantage.”
And if you want to see an example of gerrymandering, take a look at New Mexico’s congressional district map. Even the judge who ruled in favor of how the Democrats draw the lines called it a gerrymander — just not enough, he decided, to justify throwing it all out.
In his ruling early this month, District Judge Fred T. Van Soelen of Clovis declared New Mexico’s new congressional district map constitutional. He concluded that a little bit of gerrymandering is OK, but a lot is not — and the way the Democrats in the state Legislature divided up the state’s population in their 2021 redistricting plan was not too much.
At the heart of the lawsuit is Congressional District 2, the closest thing the state GOP has to claiming any region of the state as their own. CD-1 is mostly Albuquerque urban and liberal and CD-3 is one of the most Democratic rural strongholds in the nation. So when the Dems moved a piece of conservative Roswell into CD-3 and all of rural Guadalupe County into CD-1, the political and demographic juggling made little difference. CD1 and CD3 will both easily remain in Democrats’ hands.
That leaves CD2 as the state’s only battleground district. Republicans, in challenging the 2021 redistricting, contended it set up an unfair advantage for the Democrats. The judge agreed that may be what they tried to do, but the 2022 election showed they failed. It was an exceptionally close election, with Gabe Vasquez unseating Yvette Herrell with a 0.7% edge.
Republicans argued, obviously to no avail, that Herrell should have won handily, given her name recognition and the power of incumbency. Moreover, I do wonder if the conservative southeastern portion of the district might have put her over the top if northern Roswell had remained inside CD-2.
The flip side to that argument, however, is that this district isn’t as Republican as the Republicans want to believe. Since the district’s formation in 1968, CD-2 southern New Mexico have been represented by five Republicans and four Democrats. That shows a tilt toward the GOP, but not full-scale dominance like what the Dems have in CD-3. Northern New Mexico has elected only one Republican (for less than a two-year term) in that congressional district’s 40-year history.
Back in CD-2, let’s not forget that the district’s biggest city, Las Cruces, is steadfastly blue — and that by itself is a lot of votes for the Dems. Plus, there’s another atypical rural area — up in the Gilas, in and around Silver City — that typically votes Democrat, so there’s more to CD-2 than the conservative oil- and ag-rich areas on the other southern side of the state.
Not surprisingly, state GOP chair Steve Pearce has already vowed to appeal Judge Van Soelen’s ruling. But either way that goes, CD-2 will remain a battleground district for at least as long as the Republicans hang on to Donald Trump, who has never been popular in this state.
Tom McDonald is editor of the New Mexico Community News Exchange. Contact him at:
