Comments on: What’s going on in the New Mexico Senate race?

By: Cappy

Cappy — Tue, 17 Feb 2026 14:30:33 +0000

This seems to happen a lot everywhere.

By: buddhaha

buddhaha — Sat, 14 Feb 2026 17:21:27 +0000

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.

By: Art Deco

Art Deco — Sat, 14 Feb 2026 13:38:07 +0000

The country is lost. Period.
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Well, leave or die.

By: Rufus T. Firefly

Rufus T. Firefly — Sat, 14 Feb 2026 12:40:28 +0000

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.

By: Rufus T. Firefly

Rufus T. Firefly — Sat, 14 Feb 2026 12:08:21 +0000

huxley,

From the wikipedia artcile on the novel, “You Can’t Go Home Again.”

Wolfe took the title from a conversation with the writer Ella Winter, who remarked to Wolfe: “Don’t you know you can’t go home again?” Wolfe then asked Winter for permission to use the phrase as the title of his book.

The title is reinforced in the denouement of the novel in which Webber realizes: “You can’t go back home to your family, back home to your childhood … back home to a young man’s dreams of glory and of fame … back home to places in the country, back home to the old forms and systems of things which once seemed everlasting, but which are changing all the time – back home to the escapes of Time and Memory.”

Since turning 60 I find myself more and more thinking of a quote from a different novel, L.P. Hartley’s, “The Go-Between.”

“The past is a foreign country.”

By: sythan

sythan — Sat, 14 Feb 2026 11:48:32 +0000

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.

By: Erik Peter Axelson

Erik Peter Axelson — Sat, 14 Feb 2026 09:57:31 +0000

Would it be possible for Mr Vanden Heuvel’s supporters to write in his name in the primary, thus obviating the petition route?

By: huxley

huxley — Sat, 14 Feb 2026 06:18:15 +0000

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.

By: Rufus T. Firefly

Rufus T. Firefly — Sat, 14 Feb 2026 02:59:45 +0000

Paging Dr. Huxley, Dr. Aldous Huxley…

By: Art Deco

Art Deco — Sat, 14 Feb 2026 02:17:04 +0000

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.
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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.
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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.
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(1) defective template for the printed petitions. all pages using that template are invalid.
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(2) incomplete or false statement of witness – invalidating all signatures on a page.
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(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.
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(4) failure by the circulator or signatory to fill in required data fields about the signer.
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(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.
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(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.
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(7) Duplicate signature – i.e. the voter put his signature on multiple petitions in the same contest. Only the earliest dated signature is valid.
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(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.