Swing State Psyche

By Brendan Smith, Santa Fe Reporter. Posted August 26, 2004.

When Barbara Blackwell moved to Santa Fe 24 years ago, she quickly realized that Republicans weren't welcome, so she kept her dirty little secret hidden.

"It's very awkward, and I guess I might have been a closet Republican for the first several years I lived here," says Blackwell, a local realtor. "For business reasons, there are a lot of people who are Republicans at heart who are registered Democrats."

Blackwell emerged from her shell and now is serving her second two-year term as Santa Fe County chairwoman of the New Mexico Republican Party. Her journey is indicative of the state Republican Party's growing strength and increasingly vocal presence in a swing state considered vitally important to both George Bush and John Kerry for the November presidential election.

While northern New Mexico still is considered a Democratic stronghold, New Mexicans have a split personality in party politics. Democrats hold a commanding 20-percent lead over Republicans in state voter registration rolls, so it should be a slam dunk for Democrats in any major political race. Yet New Mexicans have ping-ponged between Democratic and Republican governors, and the state has two popular, long-term US senators, one Republican and one Democrat.

"We are a swing state," says F Chris Garcia, a political science professor and former president of the University of New Mexico. "New Mexicans are willing to go with whatever person or policies that appeal to them, regardless of party affiliation."

Republican delegates from New Mexico are packing their bags for the Republican National Convention, scheduled from Aug. 30 to Sept. 2 at Madison Square Garden in New York City. Garcia believes Bush and Cheney will take the offensive at the Convention, despite past embarrassments over their tenuous justifications for the Iraq war. "Strategists will employ the adage that the best defense is a good offense," Garcia says. "You go on the offense and talk about all the good aspects, or you put a positive spin on everything as much as possible. The Republicans are very good at that, and I think that's what we'll see."

What remains to be seen is how New Mexico will factor into the presidential race, which is so polarized the candidates are spending much of their time and money searching for undecided voters in swing states such as New Mexico. Republicans also are appealing to Hispanics and young voters, with hopes of pulling New Mexico's five electoral votes for Bush. "I think there will be a lot less voting straight party line, just like it was four years ago," says Santa Fe City Councilor David Pfeffer, a Democrat who is endorsing Bush. "It could, honest to God, come down to a state like New Mexico."

New Mexico has an excellent track record for choosing presidents. Since statehood in 1912, New Mexicans have always voted with the majority of the country for the presidential winner, except in 1976 when Gerald Ford won more votes here than Jimmy Carter. The only other exception came in 2000 when Al Gore squeaked out a win in New Mexico by 366 votes. Technically, New Mexico was still voting with the majority of the country, but Bush won with a little help from the US Supreme Court and Florida election officials. "It's an amazing paradox – while New Mexico is so different demographically, it is so similar in its voting views [with the nation], at least for president," Garcia says.

New Mexico hasn't always leaned Democrat. The state was solidly Republican from 1912 until the 1930s, when the Depression put millions of people out of work and Franklin D Roosevelt offered government jobs through the New Deal.

New Mexico also has the largest percentage of Hispanics in the country, with the Census showing the state's Hispanic population increasing from 38 percent to 42 percent from 1990 to 2000. Forty-nine percent of Santa Fe County residents are Hispanic, with the percentages pushing higher for some other northern New Mexico counties.

While both Bush and Kerry have appealed to Hispanic voters nationwide, some typical Hispanic vote-getting issues don't always play well here. While Hispanics in larger border states often favor increased immigration from Mexico, many Hispanics in New Mexico trace their lineage to Spanish ancestors and don't necessarily welcome more recent immigrants. "We just have a [Hispanic] population here that is very established," Garcia says. "Mexican ties are much more distant than those in California or Arizona or Texas."

The Republican Party has tried to reach Hispanic voters, many of whom are Catholic, through the party's opposition to abortion, yet Garcia and even some local Republicans don't believe the abortion issue will translate into many votes for either party. "I don't know if that is going to be a big campaign issue," says John Dendahl, the outspoken former chairman of the New Mexico Republican Party.

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