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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 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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