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New Mexico Senate Seat

Sen. Jeff Bingaman of New Mexico has announced his retirement. This prompted some speculation that Gary Johnson could run on the Republican side, but he has flatly rejected that idea. On Bingaman’s retirement, I don’t really have that much to say. He has been a Senator in New Mexico for as long as I was […]

Sen. Jeff Bingaman of New Mexico has announced his retirement. This prompted some speculation that Gary Johnson could run on the Republican side, but he has flatly rejected that idea. On Bingaman’s retirement, I don’t really have that much to say. He has been a Senator in New Mexico for as long as I was there growing up, and I believe he’s the only member of Congress I have ever met in person. Bingaman’s politics aren’t mine, and I’ll be glad to see a Republican pick-up to change the Democratic make-up of most of our Congressional delegation. At the state level, New Mexico is a heavily Democratic state and it has been dominated by Democrats for almost eighty years, so anything that weakens the party’s grip on the state is welcome.

I would support a Johnson Senate candidacy, but the state Republican Party has tended to favor more moderate nominees for statewide offices for the sake of competitiveness*. People often refer to New Mexico as a swing state, but it is a much more Democratic state than that in Senate elections. The reality is that New Mexicans haven’t elected a new Republican Senate candidate since 1972. Johnson would be vastly preferable to Heather Wilson, but Wilson’s last run was so unsuccessful that she probably will not receive the nomination a second time.

As Weigel says, the benches for both parties are weak. I know the Republican side a bit better, so that’s what I’ll talk about here. Pearce just regained his House seat, so it’s doubtful that he would give it up again to run for Senate for a second time. Darren White has been working for Mayor Berry, and he didn’t have that great of a House run in the very Democratic year of 2008. John Sanchez has just been elected lieutenant governor, but he might see this as an opportunity to move up instead of languishing in Martinez’s shadow for four or eight years. New Mexico lieutenant governors do not succeed in winning gubernatorial elections in their own right later, so if he has ambitions for higher office this might be the best chance to come around in a while.

Update: Nate Silver seriously misunderstands New Mexican politics when he writes:

On the plus side for Mr. Johnson, New Mexico’s Republicans selected the more moderate candidate, Ms. Martinez, rather than the more conservative Allen Weh, as their gubernatorial candidate in 2010.

Anyone in New Mexico during the primary contest knows this isn’t how it happened. I was there, and I saw countless Martinez ads railing against Weh for his support for “amnesty.” Weh argued that this was a misrepresentation of his record, and he even called our house to say that he was not in favor of the 2007 immigration bill, but Martinez used it successfully to hammer him for months. It might be too strong to say that the immigration issue decided the nomination, but from the perspective of primary voters Martinez was running to Weh’s right. Her campaign was a classic law-and-order, prosecutor-turned-candidate performance. As former state party chairman, Weh was also associated with the generally more moderate leadership of the party, which made it easier to attack him as a moderate on immigration. If Weh’s ambiguous immigration position hurt him, Johnson’s much more openly pro-immigration position would make it impossible for him to get the nomination. My guess is that Johnson knows that, which is why he isn’t interested in running.

* It is a serious mistake to think of Johnson as a moderate Republican. His views on abortion and immigration aside, his fiscal views alone put him on the far right of the state party, and this is the way he would be perceived. In a way, Johnson faces the worst of both worlds: he is too liberal on social and cultural issues, and too conservative on economic and fiscal issues, and his views on military spending and foreign policy are liable to go down badly with the military and lab personnel in the state.

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