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On Tuesday, New Mexico voters elected the first Democratic Latina governor in the United States. Rep. Michelle Lujan Grisham, who made a name for herself as one of President Donald Trumps’s strongest critics on immigration, beat Republican Rep. Steve Pearce, a conservative member of the House Freedom Caucus.
Lujan Grisham’s historic win flips New Mexico’s governor’s mansion from red to blue for the first time since 2002. The 58-year-old lawyer from Los Alamos will replace Republican Gov. Susana Martinez, who also made history in 2010 when she became the first Latina governor ever elected in the United States.
Martinez was initially a Trump critic but has since supported the president’s immigration agenda, sending National Guard troops to New Mexico’s border this year. Lujan Grisham’s victory will likely end that cooperation.
Lujan Grisham currently represents New Mexico’s First District. As chair of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, she pushed back forcefully against Trump’s hardline immigration agenda, from his executive order that would deny green cards to immigrants who use public benefits to the separation of families seeking asylum at the US-Mexico border and Republican efforts to expand the immigration detention system.
“We’re doing everything we can to stop the president and Homeland Security from continuing to enact pain using the terminology for zero tolerance for anybody breaking the law,” Lujan Grisham said in June, according to the Associated Press.
Her fierce opposition to Trump’s immigration policies resonated with the state’s large Latino electorate. Nearly half of the state’s residents are Hispanic, a higher percentage than in any other state.
Yet immigration was not the top concern for voters during this election. Polls showed that the poor quality of public education and the high poverty rate were the two problems voters wanted the next governor to solve. And at a time when New Mexico is experiencing an oil boom, Lujan Grisham promised to use tax revenue to invest in schools and raise the minimum wage.
Improving education was the top priority for voters
Voters in New Mexico rejected Trump’s claim that the biggest threat to the US is a caravan of Central American asylum seekers walking to the US border.
Poll after poll in New Mexico showed a consistent theme: Education was the top concern. In a recent survey, conducted in October by KRQE News in Albuquerque, Republican and Democratic voters said that improving the state’s public school system should be the next governor’s No. 1 priority. Increasing wages and improving public safety were the second and third most important issues.
It’s understandable why voters were more worried about education than about the much-publicized migrant caravan. New Mexico’s public school system is consistently ranked among the worst in the nation. In 2017, it ranked 50th out of 50 states and the District of Columbia, according to the latest Quality Counts report by Education Week magazine. The report measures education based on school funding distribution, student achievement, and a student’s post-graduation chance of success.
Both Lujan Grisham and Pearce supported raising teacher pay, but they had opposing views about spending on early childhood education. Lujan Grisham wants to use about $57 million each year for five years from the state’s $17 billion permanent fund to provide 80 percent of the state’s children with free preschool. Pearce doesn’t want to expand early childhood programs.
Both candidates also had different ideas about how to address the state’s high poverty rate.
Lujan Grisham promised to push for a higher minimum wage
Despite her consistent lead in the polls, Lujan Grisham faced a tough race that often focused on the state’s economy. New Mexico has seen a surge in tax revenue linked to an oil sector boom in the southeastern corner of the state. The state is expecting an extra $1.2 billion in revenue for the budget year beginning in July 2019. Yet that rosy economic outlook is a sharp contrast to the economic hardships that thousands of New Mexican families are facing.
New Mexico has one of the highest poverty rates in the nation. In 2017, 19.7 percent of New Mexicans lived below the poverty rate. Mississippi was the only state with a higher poverty rate — 19.8 percent.
Lujan Grisham wants to raise the minimum wage, which is currently $7.50 an hour, to $12 an hour within four years, indexing it for inflation. The state’s low minimum wage is the “single most important factor in keeping our families in poverty,” she said during a televised debate in September.
Her opponent campaigned against raising the minimum wage, saying it would hurt small businesses.
State lawmakers tried to raise the minimum wage in 2017, but Martinez vetoed two bills that passed the Senate and the House. Lujan Grisham’s victory means that New Mexico’s low-wage workers will finally get that raise. Her support for raising the minimum wage was lauded in endorsements from two of the state’s largest newspapers.
Here’s what the editorial board at the Santa Fe New Mexican said in its October endorsement:
As we said earlier this year in endorsing Lujan Grisham in the Democratic primary — she gets that the essential issue facing the state is poverty. Fix that, and all else follows. To quote her inspiring speech to legislators from 2015: “It’s time that you declare war on poverty in New Mexico. It is time that the New Mexico Legislature flat-out declare war.”
Lujan Grisham’s win as the first Latina Democratic governor in the United States is certainly a historic moment, but it was her policy proposals that truly resonated with New Mexican families of all backgrounds and pushed her to victory.
