NM governor, Democratic leaders make case to national party for earlier 2028 presidential primary

New Mexico Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham and leaders from the state Democratic Party on Thursday morning pitched the Democratic National Committee on moving the state’s primary elections earlier in the 2028 election cycle.

“New Mexico has, frankly, everything to offer,” Lujan Grisham told the DNC’s Rules and Bylaws Committee. “We’re a minority-majority state. We have demonstrated getting Democratic value-led policies on the ground in ways that no other poor state in this country’s history has done.”

Lujan Grisham and state party officials made the case that a handful of states with early primary elections in 2028 will play a pivotal role in determining the next Democratic nominee for president. Only New Mexico is a border state with a majority-minority electorate, sovereign Native American nations and a working-class base with “more in common with red states than blue,” they argued in a presentation. 

They also presented data that showed how national challenges facing the Democratic Party are acutely felt in New Mexico, a predominantly rural state where Hispanic or Latino people make up nearly half of the population, according to U.S. Census Bureau data.

Their report found that Hispanic and Latino men, in particular, increasingly voted for President Donald Trump in 2024 and that Trump’s vote advantage doubled in rural areas.

“The voters that we’re losing nationally are in New Mexico,” state Democratic Party Executive Director Sean Ward said at Thursday’s meeting in Washington, D.C., adding that 78% of Americans describe border policy as a top priority. “There is no better place to test messaging on the border than New Mexico.”

Campaigning in New Mexico costs a fraction of what it does in states, according to Thursday’s presentation. The Santa Fe-Albuquerque media market reaches 90% of the state, presenters said, and Indigenous media markets serving the state’s tribes and pueblos are highly read. Indeed, Native American voters heavily factored into neighboring Arizona’s 2020 election, which was decided by just more than 10,000 votes.

“You can’t win by campaigning in one place in New Mexico,” Ward said.

In addition to its rural-urban divide, New Mexico is also an outlier when it comes to educational attainment. One in four New Mexicans live in a rural area and fewer than one in three residents have a bachelor’s degree, Ward said, yet the state still went blue in the 2024 presidential election even though early polling showed Trump and Joe Biden tied. 

After the presentation, national committee members asked New Mexico Democratic leaders questions about what makes the state unique, particularly focusing on its status as the only border state to apply for an earlier Democratic primary in 2028.

Lujan Grisham said border and immigration policies reverberate in New Mexico in ways they simply do not elsewhere across the nation. 

“Not every state is a border state,” Lujan Grisham said. “This notion that we’ve allowed this messaging to be that every state is affected by border policies in the same way is false. When we let a false narrative occur, it’s a problem for the Southwestern border states.” 

She also took aim at the Trump administration’s mass deportations and said it has rankled officials with both major parties in New Mexico.

“These indiscriminate, unjust, unconstitutional deportation efforts — while we have not been a target state — both parties are unhappy,” she said. “It’s enough to get solid Republican voters to vote in a general election for a Democrat.”