From a row of screens on the wall of my gym I could see the political ads blazing away. Gabe Vasquez doesn’t support law enforcement! Gabe Vasquez does support law enforcement, and here’s how much funding he’s won for cops! Back and forth, back and forth, in a $21.8 million campaign for Congressional District 2 that political reporters kept telling us was one of the nation’s most watched.
It’s hard to imagine that a single voter was persuaded by this video slugfest. Still, this was the most riveting of New Mexico’s congressional campaigns.
Vasquez, seeking a third term in the state’s most competitive congressional district, won decisively. Not because Greg Cunningham, the Republican candidate, was weak. Cunningham was a good candidate when the talking heads said candidate quality mattered. And it wasn’t because Democrats gerrymandered the district. No, it was because Cunningham misread the public mood.
Cunningham is a lifelong New Mexican, Marine combat veteran and former Albuquerque Police officer and undercover detective who owns an investigative and security consulting business.
And he’s a Hispanic candidate from Albuquerque’s South Valley, a traditional Democratic stronghold that was added to CD2 when Democrats redistricted to tilt slightly their way. Before and since, CD2 races have been close, flipping back and forth between Ds and Rs. Trump carried it in 2024. Vasquez won narrowly in 2022 and 2024, but in this election he took 58% of the vote to Cunningham’s 45%.
Republicans considered the race so important that U.S. House Speaker Mike Johnson and other bigwigs visited twice to campaign for Cunningham. President Donald Trump endorsed Cunningham, opening his October statement with “Hello New America” and claiming, “A lot of people are liking it (the name ‘New America’) a lot.”
No, they weren’t. New Mexicans of both parties reacted angrily.
With Trump’s approval rating in New Mexico at a new low of 32%, Republican candidates running in the other two congressional districts supported Trump on some issues but pointedly maintained their independence. Not Cunningham. In September Cunningham addressed the Republican Midterm Convention in Dallas.
On Oct. 12, an Albuquerque Journal poll said Vasquez had a narrow lead: 48% to 44% with a five-point margin of error. The Cunningham camp took that to mean their man was “closing the gap,” according to SourceNM.
Four days later in a gloves-off debate on KRQE, both candidates landed their punches.
Republican attack ads for months had tried to tie Vasquez to images of a masked man demanding to defund the police. In a gotcha moment, Cunningham forced Vasquez to admit that he was the man in the image, although Vasquez insisted he no longer wanted to defund the police.
But in another gotcha moment, Cunningham referred to ICE agents as fellow law enforcement officers with a job to do. Vasquez talked about “Americans getting killed at the hands of ICE” and controversial ICE arrests in New Mexico. “The policy of this administration is cruel,” he said. “It is separating families, it is orphaning children all across our country and it’s targeting people that look like me and you, Greg.”
From endless post-election analysis we know that opposition to the administration’s heavy-handed immigration policy was significant.
“The blue tsunami was caused by a Latino earthquake,” wrote Adrian Carrasquillo, national immigration correspondent for The Bulwark. “Two years after helping Donald Trump return to the presidency, Latino voters swung hard toward the Democrats… There were lots of reasons why—but the administration’s immigration policy was a big one.”
The stated goal of eliminating immigrant criminals degenerated into racial profiling, workplace raids and street arrests. Hispanics were as unhappy about high prices as anyone – and they also feared getting picked up by masked agents and detained. The bottom line: We want criminals deported, but we didn’t vote for this.
One poll found that immigration was the second highest issue among Hispanics who supported Trump in 2024 but not this year.
There is already demand for immigration reform from the next Congress, and Vasquez, a son of the border, has a chance to pull his bill out of mothballs. I hope he does.
He’ll still be dogged by his younger self, who wanted to defund the police – that’s politics – but he’s not that guy any more. He’s now a mature politician and public servant who represents a challenging mix of conservatives and liberals. He’s learned that he must serve his district from the center. Vasquez, in fact, is more moderate than Reps. Melanie Stansbury and Teresa Leger Fernandez, of CD1 and CD3, and he reminds constituents of that.
In public comments since Election Day, Vasquez doesn’t mention any blue tsunami. Voters, he said, are dissatisfied with both parties. He sidestepped any temptation to gloat and says he’s focused on challenges facing New Mexico.
Sherry Robinson is a longtime New Mexico reporter and editor. She has worked in Grants, Gallup, the Albuquerque Journal, New Mexico Business Weekly and Albuquerque Tribune. She is the author of four books. Her columns won first place in 2024 from New Mexico Press Women.
