Four years later, I think most New Mexicans would say they are not better off, if not worse.
Yet, it wasn’t enough to elect a single Republican to statewide office or yield a net gain in the state legislature.
Democrats aren’t delivering yet Republicans can’t win. What gives?
A failure to listen to voters. Professional politicians more focused on polls and photo ops than governance and leadership. Political consultants who treat the political cycle merely as a jobs program with little thought to outcome or results. In short, a cast of characters in it for power and money leaving the performance of the state in a distant second place.
Dysfunction.
Voters just narrowly rewarded a governor who failed to deliver on her “education moonshot,” somehow managed to make CYFD worse, while spending oil and gas revenues as fast as she disparaged the industry. If a gubernatorial election could result in an attendance award, ours did.
Why? Not for lack of money. Nor for lack of name recognition. Mark Ronchetti had plenty of both. But what never penetrated in most of his ads was character. We saw a personable weatherman. Or we saw attacks on the governor. Most New Mexicans already knew Ronchetti the TV personality and the governor’s problems.
Ronchetti ran a couple ads where he connected with regular working people that were powerful. They made up maybe 10% of the total ad buys supporting his campaign. We’ll never know what might have been, but maybe inverting the ad saturation with character ads making up the majority of the content could have made the difference. Voters care about character. We want leaders. We badly need leaders in New Mexico.
The two-party system is also not functioning so well in our state. Besides holding super majorities in both chambers of the legislature, Democrats now hold every statewide office. This is not healthy for balanced debate and policy. Democrats outnumber Republicans in registered voters, 44% to 31%. Independents (called “decline to state” here) continue to increase, totaling 22.6% of voters.
But these registration trends aren’t that new. Eight years ago, the numbers looked about the same, 47% Democrat, 31% Republican, 19% independent. Yet in 2014, the Republicans won a majority in the state House of Representatives. Today, they hold just 25 of 70 seats. What happened?
From my viewpoint, the culture and climate of the NM GOP changed. There have always been different factions and cliques. There has always been infighting. Six years ago, this tension accelerated with the chaotic upheaval of the Trump presidency. From 2016 on, state, county, and ward level organizations took on much of the character of national leaders.
Complete loyalty to a single leader is first and foremost. Transparency is out. Character attacks are encouraged, even (especially?) among fellow party members. The culture of angertainment is more important than an actual platform of policies that would better the lives of New Mexicans.
On November 8, voters across the nation let Republicans know that as tepid and unfocused as the Democratic Party might be right now, it’s in many places a preferred alternative to a GOP that remains in a continuous do-loop of false victimhood and outrage.
It’s time to move on from the loud and angry fringes and build a strategy for sober and conservative leadership on the issues that plague us.
We need a functioning law enforcement and criminal justice system that addresses not just offenders after the crime is committed but also root causes of crime. We need independent oversight for a CYFD that continues to put our most vulnerable residents at risk.
We need an education system that does more than provide barely adequate childcare at the K-12 level; it must prepare our children to participate in our economy as skilled workers, highly trained academics, creative artists and future executives. We need a long term economic strategy that embraces all of our natural assets while preparing for the future and encouraging our young men and women to stay in New Mexico for the tremendous opportunities here.
We don’t need more self-congratulatory press events. And we sure don’t need more fringe identity politics. With almost no new faces elected on the Democrat side, I think we will see plenty of the former. It’s time for my fellow Republicans to move on from the latter and bring real change and prosperity to the state.
Merritt Hamilton Allen is a PR executive and former Navy officer. She appears regularly as a panelist on NM PBS and is a frequent guest on News Radio KKOB. A Republican, she lives amicably with her Democratic husband north of I-40 where they run two head of dog, and two of cat. She can be reached at news.ind.merritt@gmail.com.