Serving Clovis, Portales and the Surrounding Communities

Republicans seek race they can win

Just when you think the Trumpettes have been banished from the Land of Enchantment come candidates who are already tugging on the president’s coattails, hoping to find redemption down south for the state’s beleaguered Republican Party.

After the shellacking the GOP took in New Mexico last year — Democrats won every statewide and congressional race on the ballot, and took or held on to 72 of 112 seats in the state Legislature — Republicans are in search of a race they can win.

Their greatest hope lies in the 2nd Congressional District, which was flipped to the Democrats last November by Xochitl Torres Small.

New Mexico’s Congressional District 2, or CD2, covers all of southern New Mexico and is easily the state’s most conservative district — thanks in large part to southeastern New Mexico, where a sizable portion of the state’s wealth comes from by way of the oil-and-gas rich Permian Basin and the agribusinesses of Chaves and Eddy counties.

The district is certainly more red than blue, but as is the case throughout the U.S., the Democrats tend to carry the majorities in urban areas. Two-thirds of the voters in Las Cruces, the district’s largest city, went for Torres Small over Republican Yvette Herrell, who carried most of the rest of the district in 2018.

Just two months after Torres Small’s election, Herrell announced she’d try again in 2020. That sets the stage for a big rematch — if, that is, she can win her party’s nomination again. Already she has a challenger in Chris Mathys, a Las Cruces businessman, and he’s going to try to out-Trump Herrell for the GOP nomination.

Not that Herrell is anti-Trump — far from it. She’s been singing his praises all along and will undoubtedly continue to do so to win her party’s nomination. The question is, will piggybacking off Trump’s divisive rhetoric win southern New Mexico in next year’s general election?

I doubt it. Trump’s support is soft among voters who live near the Mexican border. Case in point: Of the 16 counties in Texas that share a border with Mexico, 11 went for Hillary Clinton in 2016. All that “build the wall” rhetoric may resonate with Republicans, but I doubt it will sway border-state independent voters who see Trump’s policies creating more problems than they’re solving at the border, and it’ll just light a fire under the feet of Democrats to get out and vote in November 2020.

Mathys is launching his campaign with a drive around the nation’s fifth largest congressional district, meeting with local Republicans and visiting press offices with a vow to fight against the “Democrat Socialists” and their assaults on “our religious beliefs, family values and our love for this great country.”

He stopped in Guadalupe County (the northern-most tip of CD2) recently, and after he decried the “security crisis” at the border, I pushed back with a question or two about the “humanitarian crisis” — which he denied exists. He said he has “no sympathy” for the families (even denying that they are real families) coming up from Central America because, well, he’s been there, when he was in the military, and the circumstances there aren’t so bad and certainly don’t justify their illegal efforts to enter the U.S.

I’d write him off as a fringe candidate, with no chance at election, except that’s what I thought about Trump in 2016.

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

[email protected]

 
 
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