Marker: New Mexico Democrats Won't Say "Socialist" — but They Govern Like One

As a self-declared socialist is set to win the Democratic Senate nomination in Michigan, Larry Marker points to New Mexico's own Democrat establishment — from the Land Office to the Governor's desk — seizing control of your land, your energy, and your right to defend yourself

SANTA FE, N.M. — Today, as Democratic Socialists of America-backed candidate Abdul El-Sayed is set to win the Democrat Senate nomination in Michigan, Larry Marker says New Mexicans don't need to look that far to see where the Democratic Party is headed. They just need to look at Santa Fe.

"National Democrats, from Mamdani in New York to El-Sayed in Michigan are finally openly campaigning on what New Mexico Democrats have been doing quietly for years," Marker said. "They don't often run as socialists here — they know it wouldn't sell in a state that still believes in property rights, energy jobs, and the Second Amendment. So instead they do it one executive order, one moratorium, one emergency decree at a time. The label's different. The playbook is the same: more government control over your land, your business, and your rights — less say for you."

Locking up New Mexico's land and energy. As State Land Commissioner, Stephanie Garcia Richard — now the Democratic nominee for Lieutenant Governor — has spent years restricting access to the very trust lands that fund New Mexico's public schools and hospitals. In 2023, she banned new oil and gas leasing within a mile of schools and daycares statewide. In 2024, she froze new lease sales on the state's most valuable oil and gas tracts indefinitely — not because the law required it, but because the Legislature wouldn't give her the royalty increase she wanted.

Leading state legislators said she'd gone too far. "It is a dereliction of Commissioner Garcia Richard's fiduciary responsibility to withhold these lease sales and cause worthy and essential public institutions to lose millions of dollars in operating funds simply because she did not get what she wanted from the Legislature," said State Rep. Jim Townsend (R-Artesia). State Rep. Larry Scott (R-Hobbs) put it bluntly: "Commissioner Garcia Richard seems to think that it's now her job to overrule a decision made by the Legislature."

That's the nominee Democrats chose to promote to Lieutenant Governor.

Taking property rights from the very Navajo families they claim to protect. Senator Ben Ray Luján is right now campaigning to permanently lock up 336,000 acres around Chaco Canyon — land where Navajo allottees own their own mineral rights. The Navajo Nation Council formally opposed this withdrawal when it was first imposed, warning it strips individual Navajo families of royalty income from minerals they own outright. Luján calls it protecting a heritage site. The families losing their income call it something else: government deciding what you're allowed to do with property that's yours.

Impacted Navajo allottees lose roughly $6.2 million per year in oil and gas royalties. Navajo mineral owners face an estimated total loss of $194.3 million over 20 years due to the Chaco Canyon mineral withdrawal. That is a devastating loss of income to the community. But Ben Ray Lujan is campaigning to make sure that is what happens to the Navajo Nation.

Suspending your Second Amendment rights by decree. Again, in September 2023, Governor Lujan Grisham didn't push her most extreme agenda items through the legislature. Instead she abused her executive power by using a "public health emergency" to suspend constitutional protections. She suspended the right to carry a firearm — open or concealed — across Albuquerque, by executive fiat. It was so legally indefensible that her own Attorney General, fellow Democrat Raúl Torrez, refused to defend it in court, saying it didn't pass "constitutional muster." A federal judge blocked it days later. And when a governor tried to suspend a constitutional right by decree, the Democrat-controlled Legislature had the power to step in and rein her in. They didn't.

"From the Land Office to the Governor's mansion, it's the same instinct," Marker said. "Decide first, restrict access, and let the people affected — the ranchers, the royalty owners, the gun owners, the working families who depend on oil and gas jobs — deal with the consequences after the fact. That's not moderate. That's not just progressive. That is the top-down, government-knows-best philosophy that the socialist left has always practiced. New Mexico Democrats just haven't been honest enough to call it what it is."

Marker said voters don't need a label to see the pattern. "You don't need Larry Marker to tell you it's socialism. Just watch what they do with your land, your energy, and your rights — and decide for yourself."