Robinson: Lessons Learned From Vasquez-Cunningham Race

From a row of screens on the wall of my gym, I could see the political ads blazing away. Gabe Vasquez doesn’t support law enforcement! Gabe Vasquez does support law enforcement, and here’s how much funding he’s won for cops! Back and forth, back and forth, in a $21.8 million campaign for Congressional District 2 that political reporters kept telling us was one of the nation’s most watched.

It’s hard to imagine that a single voter was persuaded by this video slugfest. Still, this was the most riveting of New Mexico’s congressional campaigns.

Vasquez, seeking a third term in the state’s most competitive congressional district, won decisively. Not because Greg Cunningham, the Republican candidate, was weak. Cunningham was a good candidate when the talking heads said candidate quality mattered. And it wasn’t because Democrats gerrymandered the district. No, it was because Cunningham misread the public mood.

Cunningham is a lifelong New Mexican, Marine combat veteran and former Albuquerque Police officer and undercover detective who owns an investigative and security consulting business.

And he’s a Hispanic candidate from Albuquerque’s South Valley, a traditional Democratic stronghold that was added to CD2 when Democrats redistricted to tilt slightly their way. Before and since, CD2 races have been close, flipping back and forth between Ds and Rs. Trump carried it in 2024. Vasquez won narrowly in 2022 and 2024, but in this election, he took 58% of the vote to Cunningham’s 45%.

Republicans considered the race so important that U.S. House Speaker Mike Johnson and other bigwigs visited twice to campaign for Cunningham. President Donald Trump endorsed Cunningham, opening his October statement with “Hello New America” and claiming, “A lot of people are liking it (the name ‘New America’) a lot.”

No, they weren’t. New Mexicans of both parties reacted angrily.

With Trump’s approval rating in New Mexico at a new low of 32%, Republican candidates running in the other two congressional districts supported Trump on some issues but pointedly maintained their independence. Not Cunningham. In September Cunningham addressed the Republican Midterm Convention in Dallas.

On Oct. 12, an Albuquerque Journal poll said Vasquez had a narrow lead: 48% to 44% with a five-point margin of error. The Cunningham camp took that to mean their man was “closing the gap,” according to Source NM.

Four days later in a gloves-off debate on KRQE, both candidates landed their punches.

Republican attack ads for months had tried to tie Vasquez to images of a masked man demanding to defund the police. In a gotcha moment, Cunningham forced Vasquez to admit that he was the man in the image, although Vasquez insisted he no longer wanted to defund the police.

But in another gotcha moment, Cunningham referred to ICE agents as fellow law enforcement officers with a job to do. Vasquez talked about “Americans getting killed at the hands of ICE” and controversial ICE arrests in New Mexico. “The policy of this administration is cruel,” he said. “It is separating families, it is orphaning children all across our country and it’s targeting people that look like me and you, Greg.”

Robinson: Lessons Learned From Vasquez-Cunningham Race

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