Opinion: Likely to be uneventful election cycle in NM

Other than the presidential election and a super-tight congressional race down south, it’s a fairly tame general election in New Mexico. 

It could have been a more consequential year, with a mid-term, term-limited governor struggling to keep her party in lockstep on issues like crime containment and school calendars — while every seat in both the state House and Senate are up for election. 

Currently the New Mexico Senate is run by the Democrats, who command a 27-15 supermajority.

All 42 Senate seats are up for election this year, but only 14 of them are being contested. The Republicans’ chance of winning a majority in this chamber is virtually nil.

Ditto for the state House of Representatives, which Democrats control 45-25. In that chamber, 32 of the 70 seats are contested. Party control is not flipping anytime soon over here either.

As for the state’s top executive and judicial positions, it’s an off-year for those elections, so the Democratic Party’s “trifecta” of political power will hold firm in New Mexico.

Meanwhile, the state has five federal races, only one of which is truly competitive. The Harris-Walz ticket and incumbent Sen. Martin Heinrich have commanding leads over their opponents — a recent Albuquerque Journal-sanctioned poll gave them double-digit leads over Trump-Vance and Nella Domenici — while incumbent Democratic Reps. Melanie Stansbury and Teresa Leger Fernandez appear to be quite secure in their re-election bids against, respectively, Republicans Steve Jones and Sharon Clahchischilliage. 

That leaves Congressional District 2, where Rep. Gabe Vasquez is trying to win a second term against the former congresswoman from Alamogordo, Yvette Herrell.

CD2 is the state’s most conservative district and yet it has a bit of a history of going back and forth between Democrats and Republicans — especially in recent years. Since its creation in 1969, the district started with a Republican (Ed Foreman) for two years, followed by a Democrat (Harold Runnels) for 10 years, then the Republican conservative Joe Skeen for 22 years, and his successor, Steve Pearce, for a total of 14 years. Pearce had two stints in Congress, and in between, Democrat Harry Teague won election, serving for two brief years before Pearce took it back in 2010.

Pearce then served eight more years in the House, opting in 2018 to run for governor and losing to another U.S. representative at that time, Michelle Lujan Grisham from Congressional District 1.

Meanwhile, Democrat Xochitl Torres Small of Las Cruces took the CD2 seat away from the Republicans, squeaking past Herrell, who then turned around and beat Torres Small in a rematch two years later.

Then, in 2022, Las Cruces city councilor Gabe Vasquez stepped up to challenge Herrell, winning by a whisper. Herrell immediately announced she’d run again in 2024, and here we are — in another rematch, one that polls show to be in a dead heat.

The battlelines in this race aren’t too far removed from the issues surrounding the presidential campaign. Immigration and border security, abortion rights and women’s health care, and other local/national issues are permeating the air around the CD2 campaigns.

The winner in this race will matter to both political parties, since Congress is so tightly divided these days and both sides are fighting for majority control.

As for New Mexico’s other contribution to the federal landscape, our own majority will decide on where to cast this state’s five electoral votes, and they’ll go only as far as five very predictable electoral votes can go.

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

[email protected]