In a stunning display of organizational dysfunction, the Republican Party in New Mexico has failed to field a single candidate for the 2026 U.S. Senate election, leaving incumbent Democrat Ben Ray Lujan virtually unopposed in his bid for a second term. This marks the first time in post-statehood New Mexico history that a major party will not appear on the general election ballot for a Senate race.
Lujan, who first won the seat in 2020, has become a mainstay of the fringe left in the U.S. Senate, though, admittedly, finding a Democrat other than Pennsylvania's John Fetterman, who can pass for a centrist, is damned hard work. In 2020, Lujan defeated Republican Mark Ronchetti, a former TV meteorologist, by six points in a state where Democrats hold a registration edge of about 2-to-1. Ronchetti earned the right to face Lujan in the general election by winning a three-person primary race.
This time around, the sole Republican to file, Christopher Vanden Heuvel, a Rio Rancho resident and relatively unknown figure, was disqualified by Secretary of State Maggie Toulouse Oliver for failing to collect the required 2,351 valid signatures. Vanden Heuvel appears to be a political novice and, as far as I can discover, doesn’t have a candidate website.
Lest you think this is strictly a candidate blunder, it isn’t. Other GOP hopefuls, including gubernatorial candidate Belinda Robertson and Carlton Pennington, met the same fate, highlighting some structural issues. In fairness, neither Pennington, a businessman seeking to challenge Democrat Representative Melanie Stansbury (NM-01), nor Robertson, a fitness instructor, seemed to be first-tier candidates. Belinda Robertson might have added some spice to the race.
New Mexico's Republican Party, or NMGOP, has been in decline for years, holding no statewide executive offices, no congressional seats, and minimal influence in the legislature, where Democrats own both the New Mexico House and Senate. We often use the term "trifecta" to describe states where one party controls the governorship and both houses of the legislature. In New Mexico, we've moved on to something that might be called a "quadrifecta." The five elected Supreme Court seats are also filled by Democrats. I don’t know enough about New Mexico politics to criticize, as some have, the leadership of NMGOP Chairwoman Amy Barela for the failure to recruit viable candidates or, in this case, to assist candidates in gathering enough signatures to appear on the primary ballot. As a long-suffering Maryland Republican (though that suffering will end in the next two or three years when the last kid is launched), I see a lot of markers of the same systemic failure we suffer from, but we do a better job of disguising it with a quisling Republican governor on occasion.
It looks like Lujan will coast to reelection. His only opponent will be a guy named Matt Dodson running on the “Democratic Socialist” line. If Vanden Heuvel can’t manage to get fewer than 3,000 signatures to get on the ballot, then the odds of him running a successful write-in campaign are zero.
Lujan was an odds-on favorite to win, even had Vanden Heuvel made his way onto the general election ballot. That isn’t the point. Had he run a vigorous, though losing, campaign, at least he would have been able to tell New Mexicans that the GOP is alive and they don’t have to live in a one-party state. It’s obvious the NMGOP needs to retool and rebuild. That starts at the top. If the party leadership is just there to get invited to the right parties while studiously avoiding anything that could upset the political status quo, then New Mexico will look like California.
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