Conservatives Contest Long-Blue New Mexico in English and Spanish

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The last Republican who won it was George W. Bush in 2004. Like Trump, he appealed to Hispanic voters.

It’s hard to say if New Mexico is in play, but it no longer appears to be on the sidelines: New polling shows former President Donald Trump looking stronger than expected in the state against the backdrop of a seven-figure, multilingual ad buy from a GOP-aligned group.

An October survey from Redfield and Wilton showed Vice President Kamala Harris ahead of him by only four points in the state, which President Joe Biden won by 11 percent in 2020.

Polling from Kellyanne Conway’s KAConsulting shows an even tighter race, with Harris ahead by only 3 percent.

Other opinion research from this month shows Harris with a wider lead. That includes the latest numbers from the Albuquerque Journal, which has her nine points above Trump.

Over the past few months, the nonprofit Election Freedom Inc. has run ads in both English and Spanish aimed against both Harris and Sen. Martin Heinrich (D-N.M.), who is facing Republican Nella Domenici.

“We are very confident that our contributions over the past several months to the important dialogues happening around kitchen tables across the state will have a significant impact in the days to come and beyond,” Derek Dufresne, a consultant for Election Freedom, said in a message to The Epoch Times.

A Republican presidential nominee last won New Mexico in 2004. That was the year Jay McCleskey, a New Mexico political operative and senior adviser with Election Freedom, worked with the Bush–Cheney campaign.

“[George W.] Bush was able to flip it because he was able to grow his numbers with Hispanic voters,” McCleskey told The Epoch Times.

New Mexico’s majority Hispanic population includes Americans who can trace their ancestry in what is now the United States centuries into the past. For them, as for other Americans, border security matters.

McCleskey dismissed claims that Trump’s immigration policy would alienate Hispanic voters as “Beltway talk.”

“President Trump is doing extremely well with Hispanic voters, particularly Hispanic men,” said McCleskey, who was a consultant for former New Mexico Gov. Susana Martinez.

Exit polling found that Bush grew his percentage of the Hispanic vote by 10 points over 2000.

The Republican presidential nominee secured support from 44 percent of those young adults, ages 18–40, while 37 percent said they would vote for Harris.

McCleskey drew attention to Valencia County, a majority-Hispanic county outside Albuquerque that was known as a presidential bellwether until four years ago.

New Mexico may be more of a political Wild West than some of its neighbors.

Colorado, for example, was where Democrats developed a strategy to flip purple states, as outlined in Adam Schrager and Rob Witwer’s “The Blueprint.”

With mail voting and early in-person voting already underway in New Mexico, the outcome there is in the midst of being decided. Oct. 25 numbers from the New Mexico Secretary of State show that registered Democrats lead registered Republicans in overall ballots returned, 162,304 to 115,212, with relatively more Republicans opting for in-person than absentee voting, while 43,780 ballots came from voters who declined to state their registration.

“I think the state will come down to the closing argument,” McCleskey said.