What’s going on in the New Mexico Senate race?
In the last decade or two, New Mexico has become a blue state. Thus, one might imagine that potential GOP candidates there don’t have a lot of enthusiasm about running for office. But usually the party has managed to field candidates. However, now they won’t have one in the 2026 Senate race; here’s the story:
If he rebuffs a primary challenge, U.S. Sen. Ben Ray Luján is set to avoid a Republican opponent in his bid for a second term, after a potential GOP opponent was disqualified Tuesday for failing to meet ballot requirements.
The disqualification of Republican candidate Christopher Vanden Heuvel of Rio Rancho means that for the first time in modern state history the state’s general election ballot for a U.S. Senate race will have only one major party candidate.
In all, Secretary of State Maggie Toulouse Oliver ruled four candidates did not turn in enough qualified voter signatures to appear on the June primary election ballot.
In addition to Vanden Heuvel, other disqualified candidates include Republican Carlton Pennington of Moriarty in the 1st Congressional District race and Republican gubernatorial hopeful Belinda Robertson of Las Cruces.
In addition, U.S. Rep. Gabe Vasquez, D-N.M., will avoid a primary election challenge from fellow Democrat Thomas Wakely of Columbus after Wakely was disqualified from the ballot. Vasquez would face the winner of a GOP primary contest between Gregory Cunningham of Las Cruces and Jose Orozco of Albuquerque in the November general election.
So, the fourth disqualification was of a Democrat, but that Democrat was opposing an incumbent Democrat member of the House of Representatives, who will be facing the winner of the GOP primary. The other three candidates who were disqualified seem to include every single Republican who was running for the Senate.
I noticed in some comments on sites on the right that there’s a lot of railing against the stupidity and loser-mentality of the GOP. But, although I read quite a few articles on what happened, I have yet to learn answers to the following relevant questions:
(1) Did the GOP candidates for the Senate simply fail to get enough signatures, period?
(2) Or did they get enough but some signatures were disqualified, enough to bump them off the ballot? And if so, how many?
(3) On what were the disqualifications based? Valid or not?
I could find no numbers or details on what happened and no answers to these questions. But where the blame should fall depends on those answers, I think.
The last Republican to win a statewide office in New Mexico was a judge, in 2016.
The present Republican candidate for governor is also facing a court challenge about residency. And the Secretary of State is, of course, a Democrat.
If you have more details that might answer my questions, please let us know in the comments.
[NOTE: And yes, disqualifying the opposition on the basis of signature flaws was a favorite ploy of Obama in his early years. See this.]
[NOTE: And yes, disqualifying the opposition on the basis of signature flaws was a favorite ploy of Obama in his early years. See this.]
I was going to comment on Obama’s signature ploy but you beat me to it. 🙂
My guess is that there were enough signatures, but the Demos disqualified enough to get him off the ballot. Invalidating signatures was a common practice of Chavismo.
I keep wondering if this pendulum will ever swing back. Will there come a time and place where Democrats will be disqualified from ballots because of issues with the petitions, and whether majority Democratic voting districts will ever be declared invalid because of how the district boundaries were drawn?
It feels to me as if the tide is constantly moving in favor of the Democrats (or more properly, being moved in favor of the Democrats) and there is no return to the status quo ante.
If this is so, the Republicans will eventually disappear as a political party and the Democrats will eventually America’s sole political party.
F,
Me too. Especially with what VA is doing …see Neo’s Roundup above. It does get depressing.
F: I have no doubt the Ds will win this fall: they cheat well, they pass laws making cheating legal, and most importantly, they’re well organized. DJT will have his hands full the last two years with a Congress much more hostile than it was the first time through. And I suspect a planned “black swan” war event will break out in full before the 2028 elections.
I enjoyed living in America … not sure what this mess is now.
In New York, the first instance would be in front of a board of elections. County boards have two members – one appointed by the Democratic county chairman and one by the Republican county chairman. The state board has four members, two each appointed by the respective state chairman. I had a conversation in 1988 with a county board who had a brief discussion of their function being fulfilled by secretaries of state elsewhere; they were perturbed by the idea. I’m told the New York City board in that time had a terrible reputation, but that was not the case where I was canvassing. You could also challenge board decisions in court; judges at that time where I was canvassing were not considered partial.
==
We’ve had this discussion before. There are a half dozen different ways to louse up a petition and it is not illegitimate for aggrieved parties to challenge them.
==
It is possible that the Secretary of State’s ruling was fraudulent. The Democratic Party is deeply awful in ways one could hardly imagine in 1988. Still, there are legitimate reasons to invalidate. The consequences per New York law ca. 1988 are noted.
==
(1) defective template for the printed petitions. all pages using that template are invalid.
==
(2) incomplete or false statement of witness – invalidating all signatures on a page.
==
(3) allowing family members to sign for a voter. This is forgery; it not only invalidates the individual signature but invalidates the statement of witness, invalidating every other signature on the same page.
==
(4) failure by the circulator or signatory to fill in required data fields about the signer.
==
(5) ineligible circulator; there may be rules which require a witness to be a registered voter in the constituency in question or require those from outside to have a notary license or equivalent.
==
(6) signatory not registered to vote. If you’re collecting on a busy street rather than going door to door, you do not know salient things about your signatories.
==
(7) Duplicate signature – i.e. the voter put his signature on multiple petitions in the same contest. Only the earliest dated signature is valid.
==
(8) Defective cover sheet. I can recall rulings where a petitioner miscounted the number of signatures on his petitions. There were actually more than were reported on the cover sheet. The judge ruled that the cover sheet number was controlling, costing him x signature.
Paging Dr. Huxley, Dr. Aldous Huxley…
Rufus T. Firefly:
I don’t follow New Mexico politics closely. I was somewhat active with a group of conservatives, doing door-to-door stuff. The Democrats seem pretty corrupt and nasty here too.
I was born here. I thought I might feel at home here, but that didn’t happen. Oh well.
Would it be possible for Mr Vanden Heuvel’s supporters to write in his name in the primary, thus obviating the petition route?
50 to even 60% of the country may not vote for them, but eventually Democrats will figure out how to secure 100% of the vote in all elections. The country is lost. Period.
huxley,
From the wikipedia artcile on the novel, “You Can’t Go Home Again.”
Since turning 60 I find myself more and more thinking of a quote from a different novel, L.P. Hartley’s, “The Go-Between.”
It does seem like there is a sort-of entropy towards Democratic party dominance. In general, the Democratic party favors more government control than the Republican platform. So it follows that when Democratic legislators and executives get an edge in a city, county, state… they will put the levers of government to work promoting their party.
The country is lost. Period.
==
Well, leave or die.
Nobody seems to ask how the D’s have managed to control NM politics for so long. I can tell you. The reservations. Due to their unique culture, the mechanisms of political machines slide into place over the rez with no effort. Government money. (Why “government money” goes back to the establishment of reservations in the first place.) Leadership that, though “democratically elected”, is almost hereditary. Leadership which controls the distribution of government money. Which leads to: votes “exchanged” for that government money – the very definition of a political machine. Given that it is impossible for an outsider to take a leadership position within the tribe, change is very rare. The leadership naturally gravitated to the Democrat party – the party of government (the wellspring of much of the reservation’s economy). There’s over 20 reservations in the state, with almost 10% of the population, and that block is solidly D.
You get 41% of the population to vote D, and there are a large number of government jobs to support that percentage, and you end up with a state that will be Democrat to the bitter end.
This seems to happen a lot everywhere.