Experts Watch for ‘Pendulum Swing’ in New Mexico as Officials Battle Election Misinformation

SANTE FE, N.M. — Experts will be watching primary results in New Mexico as the state’s progressive movement shows signs of weakness ahead of the June 7 primary.

Meanwhile, New Mexico’s secretary of state has launched a new Rumor vs. Reality campaign to combat election misinformation and election integrity criticisms from conspiracy theorists and an energetic Republican voter base.

“We, in New Mexico, are suffering from the same kinds of anti-establishment mistrust in government that you see particularly in the more conservative realms of politics,” Alex Curtas, communication director for the New Mexico secretary of state’s office, said.

“This problem, and it has become quite a problem recently — since 2020 and not before — is with people getting the wrong information about how our elections are run, how our laws are written and what they mean and how the procedures go,” he continued. “So, we created this website as part of an ongoing program to try to use our platform at the secretary of state’s office to combat misinformation.”

The website fact checks a myriad of election conspiracies popularly repeated among conservatives who deny the 2020 presidential results — from concerns about ballot secrecy and the internet connectivity of voting machines, to the accusations of large-scale ballot fraud found in the recently released “2000 Mules” movie by conservative filmmaker Dinesh D’Souza.

It’s an effort Curtas believes has been received well by a New Mexico electorate bombarded with falsities about America’s most sacred civil responsibility. Still, with the primary rapidly approaching, and the “Rumor vs. Reality” campaign only in operation since June 1, state efforts to curb misinformation ahead of the election have had little time to make an impact.

“We’ve had a pretty significant progressive shift in local politics over the last handful of years, and really a lot of us think that this election is going to be a barometer on whether Democrats have moved too far to the left, and if we’ll see a pendulum swing back to a conservative side of politics,” Gabriel Sanchez, a professor of Political Science at the University of New Mexico and Rubenstein Fellow at the Brookings Institution, said.

Progressives have been winning big in New Mexico for several years now. On top of several positions on the Albuquerque city council, Democratic Albuquerque Mayor Tim Keller easily took a 2017 victory with 62% of the vote, later pushing to convert the city to 100% renewable energy by 2030, and Democratic Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham won her first gubernatorial victory in 2019 by a 57 to 42 margin pushing gun control legislation, minimum wage raises and free college tuition.

However, that momentum appears to have shifted. Keller won a second term in office in 2021, but it was a lot closer than most thought it would be, according to Sanchez. On top of that, the city of Albuquerque lost several of those newly won progressive city council seats very recently to Republicans. Moreover, national economic hardship and increases to the cost of living have been favoring Republican candidates in primary elections across the nation.

“It’s going to be a bit tighter of a race, primarily because our president’s approval ratings continue to not only be low, but consistently lower than the week before,” Sanchez said.

On the Republican end, internal party conflicts are working to separate pro-Trump and no-Trump candidates across the board. Mid-May polling by the Albuquerque Journal placed Mark Ronchetti, a former television meteorologist, top of the pack, but infighting and races to the right may put off more moderate voters in the general election against incumbent Lujan Grisham.

High Republican voter turnout will likely be key to any form of success for Republicans across the state.

Regardless, New Mexico voters will have to wait and see if any of these developing factors will impact the expected Democratic victory in the southwestern state.

Brock can be reached at [email protected]