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Notes -
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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