The sweeping repudiation of President Trump and his Republican allies in the midterm elections in New Mexico two weeks ago gives a lot of us a renewed sense of optimism about the efficiency and campaign strategy of the Democratic Party here.
This was as thorough a political thumping as one could imagine. This is especially so given the enormous and preferential coverage Trump gets from virtually the total spectrum of mainstream media, even the news organizations that attack him. Trump is treated as the only game in town, even by supposedly neutral and bipartisan news operations like PBS, which has abjectly fawned over the president in every newscast since mid 2015.
The midterm election was a referendum on Trump and Trumpianism, and Trumpists and the president’s maniacal solipsism, his vile misogyny, racism, domestic cruelty, environmental hostility and international bullying. And he lost big time across the nation and especially here.
New Mexico is everything Trump hates. We don’t kowtow to anyone. Our attitude is reflected in a slogan that appeared in Las Vegas, NM, several years ago. Las Vegas called itself, “The City Indifferent: we don’t care who you are.” Swollen egos like Trump’s just don’t do well here, in northern New Mexico or across the state.
Trump’s administration — the virtual three ring circus full of mad-cap clowns, mercurial firings and seriously dangerous goofy international antics — is so over-the-top that even traditionally conservative southern New Mexicans couldn’t stomach him and his candidate for governor, the Trumpian Steve Pearce. That the GOP has become too objectionable to vote for, even to rock-ribbed ranchers and hard scrabble farmers, is almost as significant as the Democrats amassing a U.S. House majority despite dire predictions of GOP gerrymandering making such a happening virtually impossible.
So what does New Mexico’s Democratic total rout of the GOP say about the possibilities for a complete Trumpish right-wing defeat in 2020?
History tells us it could say quite a lot. As Matthew Reichbach reported back in 2015 in The NM Political Report, the University of Virginia Center for Politics ranked Ohio and New Mexico as the two most reliable presidential bellwether states in the union. At that time both had voted over 90 percent of the time for the winning president candidate, with New Mexico being wrong only twice out of 26 election cycles. Even after last election where New Mexico voted for Hillary Clinton — who won the popular vote by nearly 3 million votes — we still rank at nearly 90 percent for correctly calling the vote for the highest seat in the land.
Will that hold up in two years? And what might it portend for Trump and his white nationalist, woman-hating, anti-Semitic Party of pollution, hate and xenophobia? Why should the most eccentric state in the union also be one of the most representative. And are we still?
New Mexico has clearly become a feminist majority state, mirroring the convictions of many tens of millions of women voters across the country. With Michelle Lujan Grisham as governor, Deb Haaland as the Congresswoman from the 1st Congressional District, Xochitl Torres Small representing the 2nd Congressional District and Stephanie Garcia Richard elected State Land Commissioner, New Mexico is beginning to fulfill the vision of the New Mexico Commission on the Status of Women formed in the early 1980s. The commission was infamously defunded by Gov. Susanna Martinez, who is not a Trumpian owing to her gender and ethnicity, but who is a typical do-nothing, bottom-of-the-barrel Republican.
New Mexico’s status as a bellwether representative of national thinking is grounded in qualities that make us, paradoxically, unique among the states. At the heart of it is our diversity as a heavily urbanized and richly rural state with a population that represents the full spectrum of American life — from being the heartland of indigenous Hispanic culture, a state with a proud heritage post-Civil War African American migration, an R and D center for national defense, and world of miners and drillers, to a state with a profound continuity of Native American culture, a long and prosperous history of farming in dry and highland conditions, a cowboy culture that has flourished into the 21st century, a state with more PhDs per capita than any in the nation in the union, and a vibrant immigrant community from Southeast Asia and south of the border.
We are the place where almost everything in America comes together, including the torments of poverty and child hunger, the injuries of economic hierarchy and injustice, the torture of racial hatreds that often lurk below the cartoon of tri-culturality in our state, and the American disease of police violence and racial profiling that has caused so many tragedies here and across the country.
The midterm anti-Trump backlash in New Mexico this year is many magnitudes more significant than the conservative-dominated mainstream media here or the national punditocracy is willing to acknowledge. It is a very big deal indeed. And ought to be, if seen for what it is, the kind of energizer for all of us here and across the West that helps us dispel our despair over the elections of 2016 and move to begin repairing the terrible damage to our constitutional infrastructure and national character inflicted on us by the president over the last two years.
*Nullius in verba: take nobody’s word for it
(Image derived from photos by Ed Schipul and LollyKnit.)
It’s amazing to go to see this site and reading the views of all colleagues about this paragraph,
while I am also keen of getting know-how.
I am glad to see NM put women in important positions. I was born in NM but live in California for the last 40 years as a man I have voted for women for congress in hopes that they would bring the male dominated congress out of the 1800’s.
Also look at Mrs. Trump who went to Africa and held hands with black children and in poverty. This woman who said she wants to stop bulling on the internet. Maybe an alliance behind enemy lines. She may be his only reality check.
It was good to hear the spirit of celebration, newly minted optimism, and just generally a round of huzzahs.. learned quite a bit about NM too..
thank you ..
V.B. I began reading this morning’s column with pride–at New Mexico being considered a bellwether state in terms of political elections and also because you so accurately point out our cultural independence. But I must confess to disagreeing when I get to the following paragraph:
“New Mexico has clearly become a feminist majority state, mirroring the convictions of many tens of millions of women voters across the country. With Michelle Lujan Grisham as governor, Deb Haaland as the Congresswoman from the 1st Congressional District, Xochitl Torres Small representing the 2nd Congressional District and Stephanie Garcia Richard elected State Land Commissioner, New Mexico is beginning to fulfill the vision of the New Mexico Commission on the Status of Women formed in the early 1980s. The commission was infamously defunded by Gov. Susanna Martinez, who is not a Trumpian owing to her gender and ethnicity, but who is a typical do-nothing, bottom-of-the-barrel Republican.”
I am as thrilled as you are about the women (and men) who won here two weeks ago. But I do not believe they are all necessarily feminists simply because they are women. By that reckoning one would have to count Sarah Palin, Kelly Anne Conway, Sarah Sanders and others as feminists, and they clearly aren’t. Neither would I say Susana Martinez isn’t “Trumpian” simply because she is a woman and Hispanic. She obviously would have been delighted to be his running mate way back when, and her politics often reflect his.
Feminism is not about being a woman or a man. It is about patriarchy and power. For this reason some men are feminists and many women aren’t, despite their gender. Feminism is much more than biological determinism. It is a way of looking at power as it affects all people.