Democratic New Mexico Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham on Tuesday won a second term, staving off a spirited challenge from former television meteorologist Mark Ronchetti, the Republican nominee.
Lujan Grisham had been favored for much of the gubernatorial campaign. The former six-year House member sought reelection in a state where Democrats have the advantage. In 2020, President Joe Biden beat former President Donald Trump in New Mexico 54.29% to 43.5%.
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Lujan Grisham easily won the New Mexico governorship in 2018, succeeding two-term Gov. Susana Martinez. Still, this year she faced an aggressive challenge from Ronchetti, whose experience as a weatherman in Albuquerque, New Mexico’s biggest media market, provided him name recognition among voters and helped polish his communications skills.
Ronchetti hammered Lujan Grisham on crime and education. And like the Republican governors of neighboring Arizona and Texas, Doug Ducey and Greg Abbott, respectively, Ronchetti decried what he called lax security at the U.S.-Mexico border. There are three border crossings in New Mexico along its 179.5-mile international line. There are six each in California and Arizona and 20 in Texas.
New Mexico had to pick up the slack from the federal authorities, argued Ronchetti, who was the 2020 New Mexico GOP Senate nominee, losing to then-Rep. Ben Ray Lujan (D-NM) by a 6.1-point margin.
Ronchetti’s campaign also sought to highlight a sexual harassment claim against Lujan Grisham before her election as governor in 2018.
“Wouldn’t this get you fired?” intoned a television campaign ad narrator in Ronchetti’s spot.
Lujan Grisham, however, pushed back hard on Ronchetti over abortion, a potent political issue after the June 24 Supreme Court Dobbs decision overruling Roe v. Wade and effectively giving states the power to regulate the procedure.
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In 2021, Lujan Grisham helped state legislators repeal a dormant 1969 statute that had outlawed most abortion procedures as felonies.
“Because I’m governor, abortion is legal in the state of New Mexico,” Lujan Grisham said in an Oct. 1 debate with Ronchetti. “As long as I’m governor, a woman’s constitutional right to privacy to make her own highly, deeply personal decisions about her healthcare and her family’s will stay legal.”
