The 2018 battle over New Mexico’s most conservative district shows just how undemocratic politics can be

On Nov. 21, 2017, in Las Cruces, New Mexico, Angel Peña met Xochitl Torres Small at a coffee shop to talk Democratic politics. Peña was preparing to run for Congress, and Torres Small had come to ask him not to. “We are running now, so you can step down,” she said, according to Peña. “We” referred to Torres Small and her husband, Nathan Small, a state representative, who was Peña’s close friend. Peña was shocked: A few weeks before, uninspired by other candidates, Peña had told Small that he planned to run, and Small hadn’t said anything about his wife. Peña hadn’t thought to ask. From 2009 to 2012, Torres Small had run Sen. Tom Udall’s southern New Mexico field office, but she’d been less involved in Las Cruces politics recently. After leaving his field office, she went to law school at the University of New Mexico, three hours away in Albuquerque, and then clerked for a federal judge in Las Cruces before accepting a job in the private sector as a water attorney. That night, Peña emailed Torres Small. Letting small groups of people select political candidates made him feel uncomfortable, he said, and he declined to drop out. But a few months later, Peña would find himself forced from the race anyway, disqualified by the New Mexico secretary of State and bankrupted by lawsuits, one of them brought by Torres Small’s campaign. His closest supporters called what had happened “candidate suppression.” They believed that the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, or DCCC, which works to elect Democratic House majorities, had rigged the game against him and other candidates, and that the local establishment had followed its lead. Recently, sprawling Western districts like Congressional District 2 have become crucial swing districts in the fight for congressional majorities, and Democratic Party leaders have begun targeting them earlier and more directly. Often, this means picking favorites long before primary voters head to the polls, clearing the field before the race begins. For some, such party control is inoffensive, but others see it as a shrinking of democracy...MORE

Read on for the nitty-gritty politics of the 2nd Congressional district in NM