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Ever since a police standoff with a homeless man ended in the prosecution of two policemen, I’ve Noticed that my hometown of Albuquerque, New Mexico seems to be functioning as a testbed for leftist movements in coastal cities and inner cities across America. We seem to be a perverse Peoria.
Here’s the next one coming your way: Solomon Peña.
A thief and felon, who somehow managed to convince the right people to let him on the ballots, ran as a Republican to be state legislator in a heavily blue district. Predictably, he lost. He hired a literal conspiracy of people to shoot at Democrat office holders’ homes.
The national news media is calling him a MAGA candidate / MAGA Republican in every news article. I’ve heard from a local who know him and apparently he was always a little off his rocker, not a steady America-First patriot.
Police arrested him ONE DAY after the Bernalillo County Republican Party convention, which I attended along with hundreds of other GOP locals, mostly my parents’ peers. The MAGA wing was out in large numbers, and together we elected a new Treasurer and Vice-Chair. The Chairman retained his seat, the Chairman under whom Peña was allowed to become a candidate. The next day, Peña, who had been the prime suspect for a little while, was arrested.
I cannot overstate how much this one lone nut tarnished the local party in our semi-megalopolis, and I cannot overstate how non-representative he is of the people I met and caucused with. Peña is, in my estimation, one of a tiny minority of politically active Albuquerque Republicans who would even know how to contract with other criminals to shoot up politicians’ homes. I literally only had to Google “Albuquerque Republican” to find the NPR story I linked above.
This stinks of “sources and methods” in my opinion. That story will forever be linked with Albuquerque Republicans. It has been a rousing success for the left in New Mexico’s biggest city. So, I expect similar stories to start popping up in other big blue cities, probably with higher body counts. And it only takes one dead legislator to call MAGA an insurrection movement and make it legally stick. No Republican will be allowed to denounce Peña (or any future similar incidents) and still laud Trump without being called a liar on the denunciation by the media.
I just apartment sat in Albuquerque for a month and it definitely gave me California vibes, albeit not as acute or heavy on the street level dysfunction. More native American homeless and fewer black as well. It has that wide open and nomadic thing going on that you see all across the mountain and coastal west.
Not really speaking to your post but, because Albuquerque.
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Did he or did he not have and (R) by his name, is the question.
He did, so it is, style of thing.
If the (D)'s have to suffer their maximally embarasing blue haird types; the (R)'s must likewise endure their own flavor of moron.
The issue is that it's asymmetric warfare. The (D)'s don't have to suffer as much, or for as long, due to media sympathies.
What was once just media sympathies has given birth to a genuinely more grounded and sane-sounding professional class. This is what comes of holding the megaphone and losing the midwit* normies to the other side/social proof.
*This term has come to signify stupid in practice even though it's getting at the modal college degree-holder who is probably slightly above average intelligence.
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AOC may be dumb, but she is also genuinely less entertaining than MTG when she makes laughably false claims. Some of it is just down to juiciness more than media bias.
Yep, but some of it is down to bias. Because the media are biased.
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Defending democracy against right-wing extremists by means fair and foul, that's what this looks like. "No bad methods, only bad targets".
(sigh)
The problem with Trump is that he sucks as a president. He's a good showman, not a good executive. Maybe getting rid off him and having someone newer with a broadly similar agenda would help.
Of course, as a resentful provincial, one may be tempted to support Trump merely because Trump/Dems strife is more likely to result in the provinces getting free than a capable presidential administration! I suspect this is the reason e.g. Niccolo Soldo is pro-Trump, purely instrumental reasons.
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It seems fair to point out that the local Republican Party did in fact run this guy. It seems even more fair to point out that they probably weren’t paying attention and he just seems like a general nut.
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The enemy here is only secondarily the Republican criminal, and primarily the media. If the media did its job honestly, it would report that he was chosen under circumstances which don't reflect on the party because Republicans don't run in his district.
I think there are still some issues with the administration for the state-level GOP. You can find their House GOP spokesman providing bizarre defenses back when Pena was 'merely' a nutty fifteen-time-felon:
Many argue that one of the major weaknesses of the GOP as an organization is that it affords way too much control and autonomy to it's state and municipal level representatives. Of course just as many Republicans would argue that this is a feature not a bug, distributed authority and internal loci of control being core components of republicanism as a political theory.
The downside of course is situations like this.
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In fairness, a big factor complicating McConnell’s opposition to the terrible candidates in GOP senate primaries was that Trump endorsed these terrible candidates- I have no doubt that at least warnock won mostly because the reason his opponent didn’t know how many kids he had was a toss up between ‘just never bothered to keep track’ and ‘no longer capable of counting due to brain damage’.
In contrast, in Texas(Perry and Cruz) and Florida(Desantis) where non-Trump endorsements were more important, the GOP ran strong candidates in competitive races and generally had a much better record.
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I think the process here is key. Was any voting necessary? How was this decision made?
This seems like a legitimate failure of the local Republican party worthy of criticism, with proper perspective of course not as an indictment of the party nationally. This post is like an inverse “Republicans Pounce!”
Note that this isn't the first time something like this has happened either. In 2018 a Neo-Nazi named Arthur Jones was the Republican Party candidate in Illinois's 3rd Congressional District. A district that is also heavily blue-leaning. Jones ran unopposed in the primary because the state party couldn't find anyone to run against him. Who wants to run a primary race against someone just to get to a general election you're almost certain to lose? I suspect in general you can find more out-there candidates running in races where they don't have any realistic prospect of victory (as seems to have happened with Peña).
This seems like an obvious failure mode of a situation where the party doesn't centrally control who can run on that party's ballot and it's difficult to recruit more traditional candidates (due to remote chances of victory).
The libertarian party handles this by always having a "none of the above" option in party primaries.
I personally feel that all elections should have a "NOTA" option.
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I mean, a party should be able to find people willing to curry favor with the party by running against an odious candidate whose primary win would diminsh party's reputation on a higher level.
'Taking one for the team' kind of situation. It's not really extremely onerous to do a bit of campaigning to defeat a really crap candidate , and doing so should give you some reputation with your own faction because you prevented a bad situation.
The Republican Party is generally not centralized enough to consistently reward people for taking one for the team, and in New Mexico probably doesn’t have rewards to dole out to begin with, considering it’s statewide underdog status.
In states like Florida and Texas there are very many people genuinely ideologically committed to one party GOP governance, and willing to suffer mild embarrassment for the sake of that commitment(I’ve met them), but that’s not an option in New Mexico- protecting the New Mexico GOP’s reputation doesn’t have many, if any, near term benefits from the perspective of an ideologue.
And even if the party did find a candidate and engineer a primary win, I imagine the MSM would just flood the zone with "Hey, can you believe this nutjob here ALMOST won a rethuglican primary?"
Doubtful. No one- including the parties in question- cares about the runner up to a designated loser spot in a no name state level race. Even if this 15 time felon had lost 162-161(remember, there were only 383 votes cast in the republican primary), no one would have paid any attention to it until after he started shooting.
Heck, my state representative district(so safe R that democrats don't run a candidate) went to a runoff between a pornsite owner promising to play dirty on consolidating GOP power through explicit legal chicanery and a popular sitting incumbent, and it didn't even make local news(and it seems fairly apparent to me that he lost mostly because he owns a pornsite and the incumbent dragged a popular former governor into campaigning for her). Why? Because no one pays attention to a state representative race until a nutjob actually does something nutty. The number of sitting state reps all over the country who are crazy shitheads is fairly high, and no on pays attention to them at all most of the time. Even when they threaten to start civil wars and have ties to militia groups which cause evacuations of the state capitol it's like a page 5 story, and that's on a slow news day.
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Pena ran for New Mexico State House District 14, a location that'd been heavily Blue-leaning long enough that the last time the Republicans put forth a candidate was 2014. His primary run was unopposed.
I can't find good information about the requirements to run in the GOP primary, but Ballotopedia lists 383 votes in the primary as a whole for his spot, and the state-wide rules for candidacy as a first-party candidate are "Nominating petitions for those candidates shall be signed by a number of voters equal to at least two percent of the total vote of the candidate’s party in the state or congressional district, or the following number of voters, whichever is greater: for statewide offices, two hundred thirty voters;...".
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"Pounce, Republicans!"? "Ecnuop Snacilbuper!"?
More seriously, most of these kind dynamics have to do with human nature, not one side being uniquely bad. The disparities in who it applies to come from one sides having more power, and power corrupting.
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So what are you exactly claiming? That Peña is some sort of a double agent for the Dems?
How would you react if a radical-left Democratic politician had hired someone to shoot at his opponents and someone posted to this forum going "ooo, the Republicans are going to have a field day with this"?
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What do you mean by "sources and methods"? That phrase is doing a lot of work in your post but it is unclear weather it is working hard or hardly working.
It seems reasonable to assume that y'all nominated and voted for this candidate with full knowledge of his positions and agreed with them as he did not hide them. His past was readily discoverable. This seems more like a failure (?) on the local party's part rather than some covert opperation by the provenly inept deepstate.
He got 383 votes in the Republican primary and only won because Republicans haven't put up a candidate in the district in almost a decade. It's a guaranteed blue seat.
Party problem then.
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I don’t have an actual conspiracy theory of who spurred who to doing what, if anything. It was just an amazingly bad coincidence for Albuquerque Republicans that we didn't have the info on Peña’s criminal actions in time to vote out the chairman under whom he was nominated.
It feels like a successful intelligence operation, similar to school shootings by suspects who were on the FBI’s radar. “Sources & methods” is a shorthand reference to the intel community claims that their vital national security work was endangered by attempts to disprove the Trump Russia hoax operation, [Crossfire Hurricane](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crossfire_Hurricane_(FBI_investigation)).
Are you saying school shootings are intelligence operations? Are you saying this guy was FBI or instigated by FBI? Very offhand underspecified remark for such a wild implication
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