With little or no competition for the state's congressional seats and no statewide offices on the ballot, three battles for District Attorney in three of the state's four largest cities largest cities have taken the primary spotlight. 

Coming in the middle of an ongoing crime crisis and with the Governor calling a special legislative session for July to tackle more crime bills, that seems appropriate. 

In  the DA's race in Santa Fe, Los Alamos and Rio Arriba counties,  District Attorney Mary Carmack-Altwies is in a rematch with former DA Marco Serna. He won the office for one term but in 2020  made an unsuccessful bid for the northern congressional seat. 

Carmack-Altwies has been hammered by Serna for hiring outside special counsel to lead the prosecutions  in the high-profile Rust movie set shooting that claimed the life of a cinematographer and whose star--Alec Baldwin--will stand trial on charges this summer. But her office brought home a win in the case when in March movie armorer Hannah Gutierrez Reed was was found guilty of involuntary manslaughter and sentenced to 18 months in prison.

Serna is also critical of his successor's handling of DWI cases, saying it has resulted in fewer cases being pursued but the incumbent says her conviction rate is 80 percent. 

Serna, 40, is now more seasoned but his running of the office while seeking the congressional set has been a point of contention. Carmack-Altwies, who worked under him, says he was a bungling administrator.

The two faced off in a spirited debate recently that can be seen here. There is is no Republican seeking the office so the primary winner takes the prize.

BERNCO BATTLE

DA Bregman

Here in Bernalillo County, his polling must show an unabashed tough on crime stance is popular with all types of Democrats from conservative to progressive. 

How else to explain MLG-appointed District Attorney Sam Bregman again showcasing his black hat in his first campaign ad in his contest with former US Attorney Damon Martinez in the Democratic primary for DA?

Bregman's donning of the black cowboy hat, accompanied by his tough crime talk, makes him appear like  a rural county Trump-backing Sheriff but he's betting BernCo is sick and tired of the constant drumbeat of crime. His 60 second spot reads like this: 

In January of 2023 I was appointed district attorney. Since then we've worked around the clock to fight back against Bernalillo County's historic crime wave, taking on the cartels, putting violent gang members behind bars and establishing a zero tolerance policy for guns in our schools. 

Using cutting edge technology to crack down on illegal guns. Unclogging the backlog of open sexual assault cases to get justice for victims. Increasing pretrial detention so instead of violent suspects right back on the streets they remain in custody. 

I took this job to fight crime because our law-abiding residents outnumber the few who are making it unsafe. I am running for district attorney to protect my family and yours. That's why I'll throw the book at career criminals who put our community under siege. Join us, cuz we're just getting started. 

Damon Martinez would like to confront Bregman over his messaging but his campaign says Bregman has turned down a TV debate offered by KRQE-TV as well as one with the progressive group Indivisible ABQ. That could be a signal that Bregman feels he has the lead.

Martinez has raised over $300,000 and Bregman over $400,000 so both have plenty of firepower to make their cases in the final weeks. 

The campaign has been confusing to veteran observers who can't figure out where the large progressive Dem voting block will end up in this race. Maybe both contenders--neither progressive--end up splitting the vote. 

The Dem winner takes the prize. The GOP has been given ten lashes with the blog wet noodle for failing to field a DA candidate even as they assert crime is the top issue here. 

DATELINE LAS CRUCES

Finally, in Las Cruces, Gerald Byers, one of the few if not the only African-American District Attorney in the state, is seeking re-election after running unopposed in 2020. But this time he has well-known opposition in the Dem primary from Fernando Macias, an attorney, former legislator and outgoing Dona Ana county manager.

Byers says he prides himself on his management of the office now and during the pandemic. Macias pledges to "drastically reduce the rate of dismissals and operate the office with full transparency." But his county contract was ended early by the commission and that could weigh on voters. 

Shaharazad Booth and Ramona Martinez are also seeking the Dem nomination. Michael Cain is the sole GOP primary hopeful.

So while New Mexican voters are not being treated to heated primary contests at the top of the ballot, if they dig a little deeper there's plenty of La Politica to grab their attention and their votes.

This is the Home of New Mexico Politics.   

Haaland (New Yorker)

If Deb Haaland has any plans to run for governor--and all signs say she does--an encyclopedic profile from the liberal but authoritative New Yorker Magazine on her life, times and trials and tribulations will only ramp up the pressure on Sen. Martin Heinrich to publicly put aside any '26 gubernatorial aspirations he harbors.

The over 9,000 word piece (you read that number right) is a gift for Haaland, 63, the first Native American Secretary of the Interior in the nation's history who remains noncommittal about her future even as her friends and operatives here appear to be laying the groundwork for her to seek the Democratic Guv nomination in 2026. Ditto for Heinrich.

The powerfully written profile of Haaland comes close to canonizing her as it details her difficult early life, her jagged path up the power ladder and the milestones achieved as the overseer of a department with sweeping powers over the American West.

Unfortunately, Haaland was not asked directly about the governorship or, if she was, it was not included. Here's what did come out: 

Haaland is committed to staying at Interior through the election in November, but she is circumspect about her plans after that, even if Biden is reëlected. A few months after her term began, she married her boyfriend, Skip Sayre, a widowed gaming-and-hospitality executive who was then the marketing director for the Laguna Development Corporation. They own a condo not far from Haaland’s office, along with an adobe home outside Albuquerque, where they have two rescue dogs, Winchester and Remington. Haaland, now sixty-three, still runs marathons, and the pair enjoy hiking together. It is harder, these days, for Haaland to return to her ancestral home in Mesita, but she was there after her mother died, during her first year at Interior, and she sees her family often. She still hopes to get her ­master’s degree from U.C.L.A. and recently finished her thesis. She has spent more than three hundred and sixty-five days on the road during her time as Secretary.

The New Yorker finds her tenure as Interior Secretary as vindication of long-ignored Native American rights and as instrumental in redefining its mission to include social justice for Natives--most of whom live on federal lands controlled by Interior.

In taking over the department, Haaland, like all her predecessors, was tasked with overseeing one of the most diverse and unruly agencies in the federal government, so sprawling that it is sometimes called the Department of Everything Else. She has also embraced a possibly impossible challenge: not only running the Department of the Interior but redeeming it. 

That redemption includes Haaland establishing a Missing and Murdered Unit in the BIA, pursuing justice by forming the Federal Indian Boarding School initiative to investigate horrible wrongdoing against  Native youths and being "an integral player in a conservation plan pushed by Biden, called “30 by 30”—an attempt to conserve thirty per cent of the country’s land and water by 2030."

PERSONAL POWER

It's the unarguably compelling personal history of Haaland that has the most political punch in the magazine's elongated narrative as it unpacks that background with a simplistic force sure to resonate on any campaign trail Haaland chooses to step onto:

Mary and John were married in 1958, and the third of their four children, Debra Anne, was born in 1960, while her father was stationed in Okinawa. He went on to earn two Purple Hearts and a Silver Star in Vietnam. During his deployments and temporary duty assignments, Haaland’s mother would bring the children back to her parents—at first to a house in Arizona, but soon to her mother’s ancestral homeland, in Mesita, where they all lived together in a one-room stone dwelling. That house, which is smaller than the office where Haaland and I were talking, is one of the few places she has ever thought of as home. Throughout her extremely peripatetic childhood—she attended thirteen public schools in as many years—she spent summers and other long spells getting a different kind of education from her grandmother on the Pueblo of Laguna. She and her siblings helped chop firewood, bake bread in a mud oven, cook huge pots of beef posole and deer stew, and pluck worms from the stalks of corn in the fields during the summertime. Whatever the season, they bathed in a galvanized washtub with water they heated on the stove after carrying buckets from the only well in the village, and they sometimes slept together on the floor. Before bedtime, their mother would do last call for the outhouse. Once they were ready for bed, their grandmother would turn out the only light in the house.

Heinrich has already come under pressure from his GOP opponent, Nella Domenici, for not knocking down rumors that, if re-elected, he will turn right around and run for Governor. And if he wins, he would then appoint Gov. Lujan Grisham to his vacant Senate seat. 

That meme is menacing for Heinrich as he faces Domenici's unanticipated and well-funded challenge. Now there's this glowing article giving Haaland's halo extra luster that may have his own party applying pressure on him to back off from any Guv run. 

The 9,000 plus words take much weight from Haaland's shoulders not by glossing over her foibles but by effectively placing them in the context of her entire life's journey. The mountain of verbiage is easily translated into political language and thus places much weight on the shoulders of the state's senior senator. Stay tuned.

This is the Home of New Mexico Politics.  

Progressive legislative candidates are striking back against the new kid on block--the self-described anti-progressive PAC The NM Project--that seeks to elect conservative and moderate legislative Democrats and that is headed up by businessman and Dem politico Jeff Apodaca. 

He announced here last week that the group has raised "close to" $1 million to battle the left of his party but donors remain anonymous and that amount can't be confirmed. 

Our sources say the group may not be all that close to the $1 million but the coffers are ample and could pose a threat to progressives on the June 4 primary ballot. 

But the PAC is also presenting opportunity to progressives to rally their troops and raise more money of their own. 

In District 30, comprised of four counties, Acoma Pueblo resident and progressive Dem Angel Charley, faces the NM Project endorsed Clemente Sanchez, a former conservative Dem senator. He was ousted in the '20 Dem primary and is now trying to get back to the Roundhouse. Charley aims to slow his stride with this fund-raising message:  

Dear Neighbors, There’s a new corporate PAC. . .and our opponent is one of their top candidates. We’re really going to need your help to push back against this special interest PA. . . This is exactly what happened four years ago when Chevron formed a PAC to help then-Senator Clemente Sanchez keep his seat. Now, some of those same interests are yet again working to get him back to the Senate. And why are the oil and gas industry, Big Pharma, payday loan companies, and insurance companies so invested in Clemente Sanchez winning? For them, they like his record. As a state Senator, Clemente Sanchez voted against increasing oil and gas royalty rates, and he voted for keeping payday loan interest rates high for people in dire financial straits. 

O'NEILL VS. O'MALLEY

In the ABQ metro former BernCo Commissioner Debbie O'Malley is glad to have The NM Project as her money-raising foil. She is taking on District 13 incumbent Dem Senator Bill' ONeill in the primary who was endorsed by group. O'Malley came with this:

Dear Neighbors, . . .I have made the list of candidates that a corporate PAC led by failed gubernatorial Democratic candidate Jeff Apodaca has targeted for defeat. The PAC. . .laughably says they are defending Hispanic traditional values… and for that reason, they are somehow backing my opponent, Bill O’Neill.  We don’t exactly know who the donors to this new PAC are. . . After the election, we will undoubtedly come to find out this new PAC is being funded by the oil and gas industry, insurance companies, NAIOP, and the realtors. That’s no surprise. Let's be clear: this new PAC targeting me is not about race or defending Hispanic values, but about corporate special interests not liking my record. If this were about race, why would they target me, a Hispanic, native New Mexican, over an Anglo candidate originally from Ohio? I am a committed progressive Democrat who sides with families and neighborhoods over corporate special interests. Please give. . . whatever you can to help me fight back against this dark money PAC.  

But hold on. Sen. O'Neill--"The Fighting Irishman"--not known for being either a conservative or a Hispanic--is firmly rejecting the Apodaca group's endorsement as he battles to survive. He says of The NM Project endorsement:

I just want  say no thank you. . . I am proud of my progressive track record. I'm proud to be endorsed by Planned Parenthood. Conservation Voters and Equality New Mexico. 

O'Neill's problem isn't that he's not progressive enough. It's that his district has radically changed in redistricting and no longer includes many of the enclaves he could count on. Large new portions are near downtown ABQ and surrounding areas that favor O'Malley because she has represented them on the commission and ABQ City Council. 

O'Malley says after the election donors to The NM Project will become known. Perhaps. But contributions to such 501(c)4 groups are not required do disclose them. However, the assumption that oil and gas is a large donor is not without reason. 

MORE ETHNIC DIVIDE

Now down to Las Cruces and House District 53 where ethnic politics is also flaring. Anglo Dem state Rep. Joanne Ferrary turned away from fellow Dem Rep. Willie Madrid and endorsed his primary opponent, Jon Hill, and held a fund-raiser for him over the weekend. She says: 

I look forward to working with Jon on so many shared visions for a better New Mexico! His experiences and Doctorate as an educator and Superintendent in rural schools is invaluable! I appreciate his great concerns for the environment and his dedication to protect women’s right to choose!

So what's the deal with Madrid and abortion? There's an implication in Ferrary's letter that he is on the wrong side of the choice question. But Madrid secured the '22 endorsement of Planned Parenthood and voted to repeal an outdated abortion law that was the chief worry of abortion proponents.   

But the anti-progressive The NM Project found Madrid to their liking and have endorsed him which denotes his conservative approach to business legislation.

Ferrary's backing of Hill over Madrid drew a scalding response from ABQ Dem Rep. Miguel Garcia, first elected in 1996, and now the senior Democratic member of the House:

Willie Madrid is one of our most dedicated and hardest working legislators. . .Willie is a loyal Democrat and unlike some conservative Democrats in the House, he has never engaged in coalition politics with the Republicans. House District 53 is the most vulnerable of all swing seats. Willie’s past victories over Republican candidates were in the single digits. Willie Madrid is currently under attack by Chairperson Joanne Ferrary (chair of Consumer and Public Affairs and two interim committees). Representative Ferrary is blatantly supporting Willie’s primary opponent. Being a Chair of a committee is an honorable position. It denotes leadership in our Caucus. Blatantly supporting the primary opponent of Representative Madrid is malfeasance at its worst. I urge Speaker Martinez to put a tourniquet on the unethical breach by Representative Joanne Ferrary and strip her of her three chair positions. 

Garcia is a progressive but he also happens to be a leader of the native Hispanic community. Hispanic men of all political stripes are feeling left out of the Democratic tent and resentful of primary challenges to their candidates. This resentment is seen in the polling in the presidential race and now a point of contention in the NM June primary.

Rep. Madrid

Hill can use Ferrary's help. His latest campaign report showed just $4,500 in cash and he has loaned himself over $5,000. Madrid had a cash balance of $39,000.

Madrid is seeking a fourth House term. As Rep. Garcia noted, the  Dem primary isn't the only obstacle he has to overcome. He won in '22 in a close 51-49 race in this swing district. The GOP will be back again against the Dem primary winner with Elizabeth Lee Winterowd who opposed Madrid in that nail-biter. 

District 37 Rep. Ferrary used to run tight races in her own District 37 but broke away as the area became more progressive and is now seeking her fourth term. She has no primary challenge but faces Republican Ronnie Sisneros in November.

This is the Home of New Mexico Politics.