- On Tuesday, New Mexico is holding Republican primaries in all its congressional districts, including a competitive GOP primary in New Mexico’s second congressional district.
- Yvette Herrell, who narrowly lost to Democratic Rep. Xochitl Torres-Small in 2018, is running again for the seat against energy executive Claire Chase.
- Polls close at 7 p.m. Mountain Time and 9 p.m. ET.
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The stakes:
The most high-stakes Republican election in New Mexico today is the GOP primary in New Mexico’s 2nd congressional district, a crucial battleground district that Trump carried by 10 percentage points in 2016 but is now in Democratic hands.
When former GOP Rep. Steve Peace retired to run for governor in 2018, Democrat Xochitl Torres-Small narrowly beat out former state representative Yvette Herrell, a staunch Trump ally, by just under two percentage points despite Pearce carrying the district in his gubernatorial campaign.
Now, Herrell is running to face Torres-Small again in a rematch this fall. She’s vying against energy executive and businesswoman Claire Chase for the Republican nomination in the district, which encompasses much of the southern part of the state and has a substantial oil and gas industry presence.
This highly-watched primary has at points taken an ugly turn, however, with both Herrell’s and Chase’s camps lobbing salacious and nasty attacks at each other.
Herrell has been accused of spreading rumors insinuating that Chase was unfaithful to her first husband while he was deployed — a charge that both Chase and her ex-husband vehemently deny — and even gave copy-editing advice to a cartoonist looking to distribute a meme about the rumor, according to text messages obtained by the Associated Press.
In response, Chase called the rumors “despicable, untrue, and [a] deeply personal attack,” with her campaign attacking Herrell over her record in the state legislature and a separate PAC airing an ad accusing Herrell of being at a party in California where attendees hit a piñata in the likeness of President Donald Trump.
Several well-funded Democratic-aligned organizations including EMILY’s List’s Women Vote! PAC have also gotten involved in the primary by sending out mailers attacking Chase as insufficiently pro-Trump in an effort to boost Herrell, who those groups believe to be a weaker candidate than Chase.
—Kirk A. Bado (@kirk_bado) May 25, 2020
Now, Republican strategists are worried that the mud-slinging in the primary — some of which has been come from Democratic groups — could end up hurting whichever woman ends up as the eventual nominee against Torres-Small, according to the Associated Press and National Journal Hotline.
