New Mexico Republicans need a new approach

My boys, Bryce and Taylor, have spent more Saturdays in a rodeo arena than anywhere else. Team roping is their primary event; however, they will enter in whatever involves a horse and a rope. Out there, the lesson never changes. The clock doesn’t care whose fault it was. You miss your loop, rope a leg, bobble your tie, and you don’t get to blame your horse or the cow. You go back to the trailer, figure out what went wrong, and fix it before your next run. That’s the whole code out here: accountability, honor, respect, humility, honesty. No excuses. Just miles to relive those costly mistakes, lessons learned and corrections made.

I can’t help but wonder where the Republican Party of New Mexico would be if we got rid of the excuses. It’s September, and excuses are about all we’ve got for an organization that’s supposed to represent roughly one in three voters in this state.

This year has been riddled with embarrassment for the conservative movement here. Our House caucus chair nearly didn’t make her own ballot. A governor candidate spent most of his campaign proving he actually lived in New Mexico, and a sitting party chair was removed from office by a judge. Our state party treasurer is in jail, and nobody’s formally filled the treasurer’s post either, at least not that I’ve heard. On top of that, we nearly failed to field candidates for U.S. Senate, state treasurer, and state auditor, leaving Republican primary voters with only write-in candidates for all three statewide offices.

Here’s the deeper problem, and it’s the one nobody wants to say out loud: We haven’t given people a real plan they can see five years from now, backed by values instead of slogans. Without that, you don’t get new voters, new donors, or good people willing to put their name on a ballot and take the hits that come with it. What you get is exactly what we have: 378,000 New Mexicans who’ve looked at both parties and picked neither, and a bench so thin we’re begging people to run as write-ins weeks before a deadline.

Until this party turns the page, the people with something real riding on New Mexico don’t have the luxury of waiting for it to sort itself out. That means the job creators and people investing capital in the industries that sustain this state: energy, oil and gas, construction, agriculture, and tourism. It means the businesses that helped build the way of life many of us grew up with. And it means the parents who simply want their kids to have a future here instead of a reason to leave.

We make do. We run our operations, raise our families, and hope the people we vote for eventually catch up to the seriousness of the moment.

Turning the page doesn’t require a rebrand or a new slogan. It takes three things, and none of them are complicated. First, integrity — leaders who own a bad quarter instead of blaming someone else for it. Second, leadership that is not fearful of hiring someone better than they are. Third, reigniting the Christian values that embody the principals necessary to promote lasting change. If our principles are fleeting, our influence will be short lived.

Until we have all three, we’ll do what New Mexicans have always done. We’ll play the hand we’re dealt.