Need Some Good News? Why Melanie Stansbury’s Trouncing of Her Opponent in NM-1 Has Dems Smiling Bigly.

Democrats are breathing a sigh of relief and even sporting wide smiles this morning as they digest a big win and the numbers coming out of New Mexico First District’s special election. State Rep. Melanie Stansbury defeated her Republican opponent—crushed him, really—by a margin of nearly 25 points, with 60.3 percent of the vote compared to 35.5 for GOP state senator Mark Moores.

While it’s premature to draw many conclusions from the nation’s first head-to-head special federal election (the others have been open elections, not one Democratic candidate facing one Republican one), there are some interesting takeaways about the numbers, the voting patterns, the themes that were tested before the voting public.

New Mexico’s First District, where the election was held to replace the seat vacated by now Interior Secretary Deb Haaland, is a solidly blue one. Absent a catastrophe, analysts and party leaders presumed the Democrats would hold it. But the key question was, “By how much?” If Democrats underperformed there, it would be taken as a sign that they are further losing the messaging war and failing to build the enthusiasm needed for the 2022 midterms, which historically have cut against the party in power. With only a razor-thin majority, and the GOP needing to flip just five seats to make Kevin McCarthy Speaker, all eyes were on the results as they came in. Any movement toward the GOP could translate into disaster in 2022.

To set the expectations bar, election analysts look at how strongly a particular district went in the most recent elections. In New Mexico’s First, Joe Biden won by 23 points in 2020, and then-Rep. Deb Haaland by 16. Hilliary Clinton carried it by 17 points in 2016. The fact that Stansbury beat all of those margins with her 25 point win is not only impressive but very heartening. This means that the Democratic base still rallied, relative to Republican voters, to turn out for the election, even when it was already clear who would win, and even when no presidential race was at stake.

Another metric analysts review is called “partisan lean,” meaning the average margin difference between how the district votes and how the country votes overall. In the case of the NM-1, that “lean” is eighteen points in favor of the Democrats, according to the number crunchers at FiveThirtyEight. The spread put up by Stansbury beat this handily, confirming that Democratic enthusiasm in this special election was actually greater than the historical average. Again, great news.

In 2017, we witnessed a great deal of Republicans underperforming in the federal special elections, which became a harbinger for the Blue Wave in 2018. By contrast, Democrats weren’t outperforming nearly as strongly in special elections in 2019, which hinted that they might lose seats in 2020, as they did. So these early tests are key to ascertaining the mood of the country as well as voter enthusiasm.

A further key takeaway relates to voting behavior. Both sides were watching the patterns here closely. As they did in 2020, Democrats trounced Republicans in early voting, with around 54,000 early Dem ballots compared to 28,000 GOP ones, with another 10,700 undeclared. And as they did in 2020, the GOP voted more heavily on Election Day, closing the gap a bit. The heavy use of early voting by Democrats in this race may lend urgency to efforts by the GOP, especially in the states they control, to curtail such options further in order to blunt the advantage Democrats have successfully built with early voting.

Another concern coming out of 2020 had been an erosion of support for the Democratic ticket by Latino voters, especially in Texas. New Mexico’s First is also a heavily Hispanic district, and a marked shift there by those voters could again spell big trouble in 2022. While the racial breakdown of voters isn’t yet known, the fact that Stansbury put up such large numbers at least indicates that no substantial erosion among these voters occurred, even when they were asked to support a non-minority candidate like Stansbury, and despite the appeal of a law-and-order candidate like Moores.

Finally, party strategists will be reviewing the key themes the two sides tested out. Republican Moore is a seasoned, conservative state senator and a friend to the oil and gas industry. Stansbury is a state representative who worked as an environmental policy expert and as a White House aide during the Obama administration. Their candidacies unsurprisingly drew some stark contrasts.

Moores took a tough-on-crime approach in the race—one that almost completely dominated his rhetoric. He hoped this theme would resonate well in Albuquerque, which is seeing rising crime rates and violence. He blasted Stansbury in TV ads and the debates, charging that she wants to “Defund the Police” after she expressed support for a proposal from criminal justice reformers that would reduce police funding for the police, abolish ICE, and close federal prisons. Stansbury was put on the defensive, having to run her own ads featuring a retired sheriff’s deputy to shore up her pro-law enforcement record and pointing to her own legislative record of supporting public safety. 

Stansbury emphasized broader themes of economic fairness and fighting climate change, running a largely positive campaign especially toward the end of her campaign when her coffers were full and her opponent’s nearly empty. 

In the end, Moores’ attacks failed to narrow the advantage at all. Nor were they enough to overcome Stansbury’s strong cash advantage, which was buoyed by support from the national Democratic Party as well as individual donations from Democrats eager to show a big win in this important first head-to-head test. A last-minute push by national figures including Jill Biden, who made a personal appearance in Albuquerque for Stansbury, also gave her campaign strong tailwinds going into the finish.

The parties will be studying the effectiveness of both the soft-on-crime attack and the more nuanced support for some police reforms Stansbury raised in her defense. Again, while it is too early to draw too much from the results, they might be enough to give some GOP candidates pause as they and their consultants decide whether or not to go all-in on crime as a theme. The mood of the nation may have shifted beneath them in the wake of the George Floyd murder and subsequent nationwide protests. And with the reopening of the nation and strong, positive approval ratings for the Democrat’s legislative agenda, negative or fear-based attacks could backfire, even in higher-crime districts like New Mexico’s First.