New Mexico Sen. Ben Ray Luján’s confidence that his state can serve as a model for Democrats hoping to turn the southwest into a party stronghold starts with his family.
His father, Ben, grew up in a Republican family but become a prominent Democratic politician because he felt the party best served the state’s and his community’s needs.
Luján’s Republican uncle was a harder sell and didn’t vote for him during his first two campaign’s for Congress in 2008 and 2010.
But in 2012, the year Luján’s father died, Luján said his uncle decided it was time to support his nephew and his agenda.
Since that time Democrats’ fortunes in New Mexico have continued to get better. Now Luján and other party leaders there are speaking out more about their belief that the state can serve as a model for how the party can strengthen its hand in other Southwestern states by continuing to make deep investments in Latino voters, running Latino candidates and putting up a fight in traditionally more conservative districts.
“I’m very proud of the work that was done a few decades back where there was organizing from Hispanic Democratic candidates,” Luján said.
Democrats have hoped to make the Southwest, or the Sun Belt, a source of reliable support for the past two decades as the political map has shifted with Midwestern states becoming more competitive and Florida becoming increasingly Republican in recent elections. The population of the region is exploding, with transplants from all over the country, including Colorado and New York.
The Hispanic population has also grown in the Southwest, with Democrats winning over this expanding voting bloc early on while trying to beat back Republican gains in recent elections.
But through all that change in the Southwest, New Mexico has changed the least and remained, mostly, reliably blue.
Both of its senators are Democrats and its Democratic governor just won reelection. In the next Congress, all three of its House members will be Democrats. There are 45 Democrats in the state House, compared with 25 Republicans, and there are 27 Democrats in the state Senate, compared with 15 Republicans.
“New Mexico is a harbinger” for the rest of the Southwest, said Matt A. Barreto, president of BSP Research, a Democratic pollster advising the White House and campaigns on reaching Latino voters, adding that Colorado is close behind, followed by Nevada and then Arizona.
Luján, who rose through the ranks of the House to assistant speaker before he was elected to the Senate in 2020, said that New Mexico turned blue after years of work by Democrats to peel off rural voters.
Democrats “showed up in places that Republicans usually don’t have to worry about showing up,” Luján said in an interview. “It’s how I was raised. It’s how dad did it. It was part of our strategy when we were successful before — you need to go talk to folks.”
Republicans argue Democrats are overhyping their advantage and that the state remains a competitive battleground, despite the GOP’s lack of success in recent elections, pointing, in particular, to the state’s 2nd Congressional District.
“I absolutely believe that New Mexico is on the path to turning red, the same as Louisiana, Arkansas,” said Stevan Pearce, a former congressman and the head of the New Mexico Republican Party. “These are long, slow, generational-type pulls.”
A blue state without traditional liberal attributes
New Mexico, a border state, is vast in its makeup. It’s largely rural and includes oil and gas drilling in the eastern part of the state near Texas. It includes three national security research labs and 26 federally recognized tribes. Liberals reside in the cities, such as Santa Fe and Albuquerque. It is also the third poorest state in the country.
It’s population growth is one of the slowest in the country but it continues to have the largest percentage of Hispanic residents, making up nearly 48 percent in the state, according to the 2020 census. Having a stable voter bloc is a big advantage politically, too.
The rapid growth of states such as Arizona and Nevada mean that campaigns have to continually introduce candidates to voters.
New Mexico’s demographics don’t match traditional liberal strongholds, such as Massachusetts or California, but nearly a dozen analysts and political officials interviewed for this story said Democrats’ success there is multifaceted and rests on the importance of the profile of the candidates as well as consistent voter outreach outside of campaign season.
“The political ideology is less important than the candidates’ efforts to reach out to the community,” Barreto said.
Luján is the type of candidate who fits well in a center-left state, his allies said. He’s unabashed in his support for abortion access in a post-Roe v. Wade era, but in his first two years in the Senate, he has worked with Republicans to pass numerous bills focused on New Mexico, including research and development for the national labs, assistance for communities affected by wildfires and a tax credit for carbon capture to help combat climate change. Luján suffered a stroke earlier this year, which took him away from the Senate for five weeks, but has since recovered with a full work schedule.
He’s from the rural northern part of the state and still lives on a small family farm in Nambé. New Mexico boasts generations of Hispanics, some of whose families have been there since before it became a state in 1912.
Luján became the first Hispanic to represent New Mexico in the Senate in 45 years, and the fourth overall, when he defeated his Republican challenger, Mark Ronchetti, in 2020 51.7 percent to 45.6 percent.
The first Hispanic senator, Octaviano Ambrosio Larrazolo, a Republican, was elected in 1928. The second was Dennis Chavez, a Democrat, who Luján said he tries to emulate, a sign that his goal is moving into Democratic leadership. Chavez was the fourth ranking Democrat when he died in office in 1962.
Latinos make up a large share of voters in New Mexico — more than 3 in 10 voters in both 2018 and 2022 were Latino, according to AP VoteCast voter polls.
Democrats contend their support among Hispanic voters has been key to their success in the state as well as other Southwest battlegrounds in the midterms. They point to key Senate wins in Arizona by Sen. Mark Kelly (D) and Nevada by Catherine Cortez Masto (D) as well as some House victories as evidence they have maintained the support of Hispanic communities despite Republican predictions ahead of the election that these voters were moving quickly into their camp.
But the numbers in recent elections also raise some potential warning signs for the party about the strength of that support, mirroring the nationwide trend.
For instance, in 2018 Michelle Lujan Grisham (D) won the gubernatorial race with support from 71 percent of Latino voters, according to AP VoteCast. In her successful reelection bid in 2022, she won 66 percent of the Latino vote. Similar drops occurred in gubernatorial races in Arizona, Colorado and Nevada during the same time period.
But the loss of Latino support was less than anticipated and less than in Florida, where Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) picked up 11 percentage points among Latino voters between 2018 and 2022.
Florida Latinos are mostly Cuban and Puerto Rican. In New Mexico, they are multigenerational Mexican.
“The Mexican American has been a Democratic firewall for the Democrats,” Barreto said.
Pearce — who represented the 2nd Congressional District from 2003 until 2019, except for one term because he ran and lost his Senate race — said the party is making inroads in registering Hispanic voters in New Mexico. He said an increasing number of Hispanics are running as Republicans, which he says is “very important because politics is about visibility.”
Case in point: Susana Martinez, the Republican governor from 2011 to 2019. Even Democrats argue Martinez is a playbook for GOP success.
But Democrats also portray her success as unique to her as opposed to emblematic of Republican strength in the state overall.
Martinez was able to “break through the ranks and able to appeal to a wider range of voters,” said state House Rep. Javier Martínez, a Democrat in the running to be the next speaker of the state House. “Their nominees have been candidates that do not relate to large enough numbers of voters.”
A focus on Latino voters
New Mexico Democrats have done well in integrating Latinos politically, according to political operatives and analysts who follow the state. It has more Latinos elected to office than any other state and campaigns are not only bilingual but bicultural. Fifty-seven percent of state House Democrats are Hispanic. Three out of five members of its Congressional delegation are.
“We know it has an impact not just on vote choice but on Hispanic turnout,” Gabriel Sanchez, professor of political science at the University of New Mexico, said of Hispanic integration in the state. “That’s what’s made New Mexico a stronghold for Democratic politics in the Southwest.”
In his second term as Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee chair for the 2018 election cycle, Luján helped to recruit Xochitl Torres Small to run in New Mexico’s 2nd Congressional District, one of the most competitive seats in the country and a seat that has been held predominantly by Republicans since 1968.
Torres Small won. She was the first Latina to represent the district, in which 55 percent of voters are Hispanic.
She said she ran because she didn’t feel represented. “I didn’t feel like the challenges of living on the border were really seen,” she said.
Torres Small was defeated by Republican Yvette Herrell in 2020. In 2022, the candidates, party campaigns and outside groups spent about $25 million on the race, according to OpenSecrets. Herrell was defeated by Gabe Vasquez, a young Hispanic American who grew up on the border and was a member of the Las Cruces city council.
But Republicans blame the legislature for the loss, saying it created a district much more hospitable to Democrats in redistricting.
Democrats argue Republican candidates also struggled during the midterms because they were too extreme for New Mexico and too eager to back former president Donald Trump’s false claims that the 2020 presidential election was stolen.
“I was furious,” said Rochelle Williams, who started the group Blue CD2 NM last year to help elect a Democrat to represent the state’s 2nd Congressional District. “I don’t want an insurrectionist representing me.”
Emily Guskin contributed to this report.
