- Community activist and lawyer Teresa Leger Fernandez defeated former CIA analyst Valerie Plame int he Democratic primary for New Mexico’s third congressional district
- The primary to replace Rep. Ben Ray Lujan, who is running for US Senate, attracted significant outside spending.
- New Mexico’s third district is overwhelmingly Democratic, meaning Leger Fernandez is heavily favored to win the general election.
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Community advocate, lobbyist, and attorney Teresa Leger Fernandez defeated former CIA analyst Valerie Plame in the competitive Democratic primary for New Mexico’s third congressional district.
New Mexico’s third district is a safe Democratic seat which includes the capital city of Santa Fe and most of the northern part of the state that current Rep. Ben Ray Lujan is vacating to run for US Senate.
Plame became famous for having her cover as an undercover CIA officer blown after her late husband diplomat Joe Wilson publicly cast doubt on the Bush administration’s rationale for invading Iraq. Former Vice President Dick Cheney’s chief of staff Scooter Libby, who was convicted of perjury and obstruction of justice in connection with the incident, had his sentence commuted by George W. Bush and was fully pardoned by Trump in 2018.
Plame, part of a larger trend of female national security veterans running for office in the Trump era, positioned herself as a renegade political outsider intent on shaking up the system that railroaded her career.
Her first campaign ad, which dramatically showed her driving a stunt car backward through the New Mexico desert in a scene that could have been straight out of an action movie, got millions of views on social media and drew national attention — and lots of small donations — to her campaign.
“My service was cut short when my own government betrayed me,” she says. “Now I’m running for Congress because we’re going backwards on national security, healthcare, and women’s rights.”
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Plame hoped her message and national security experience in a district home to the Los Alamos National Laboratories and other top-secret national security research.
Leger Fernandez, however, has far more ties to the district and argued that she is best-poised to represent the district as a local activist who, for years, has been deeply involved in working on behalf of the Latino and Native-American communities in Northern New Mexico.
Leger Fernandez was also been endorsed by outside groups including the Congressional Hispanic Caucus’ BOLD PAC, Planned Parenthood Action, and EMILY’s List.
“Valerie Plame has her own attributes, but she doesn’t have her own understanding of the district. And that’s what I bring to the table,” Leger Fernandez told the Huffington Post. “I understand the district intimately, not because it’s campaign stop, but because it’s my life’s work.”
The primary between Plame and Leger Fernandez attracted hundreds of thousands of dollars in outside spending, as Politico reported last week. At some points it has turned ugly, with a dark money group running an inflammatory ad accusing Plame of promoting anti-Semitism on her Twitter feed and even aligning herself with white supremacists, an ad that Leger Fernandez denounced as sexist.
