Women win majority of seats in New Mexico Legislature in showcase of determination and joy

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SANTA FE, N.M. (AP) — Women have won 60 seats in the New Mexico Legislature to secure the largest female legislative majority in U.S. history, stirring emotions of joy, surprise and vindication.

New Mexico voters are sending 11 additional women — Democrats and Republicans — to bump up female representation in the 112-member Legislature. Female state senators will still hold a minority of seats — 16 out of 42.

Women have made slow, steady advances in statehouse representation across the country, with one notable surge in the 2018 election cycle almost entirely among Democrats in a trend associated with the #MeToo movement and political engagement linked to the election of Donald Trump as president.

In 2018, Nevada became the first state to elect a female legislative majority, later expanding it to more than 60% of seats with majorities in the state Assembly and Senate. Female legislators in New Mexico will hold a 54% majority — though with many more seats.

The share of women in all state legislatures combined roughly tripled from about 11% in 1980 to 33% going into the November election, when women held 2,424 seats nationwide, according to the Center for American Women and Politics at Rutgers University.

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Incoming female legislators in New Mexico include a crusading Republican advocate for crime victims, Republican Nicole Chavez, and Democrat Heather Berghmans, who defeated men in the general election and the primary against an incumbent senator accused of sexual harassment.

Chavez won her state House seat in a relatively affluent Albuquerque neighborhood. She expressed pride in contributing to the new female legislative majority — and as her district’s first Latina legislator-elect.

But Chavez also said she campaigned to ensure a diversity of political values in preserving her party’s control of the only Republican-held House district in Albuquerque, amid a growing urban-rural partisan divide.

“I don’t believe in just recruiting women,” she said. “I think we should have diversity of all values.”

She has been a prominent advocate for crime victims at the Legislature since the 2015 shooting death of her eldest son Jaydon, then a high school senior and football team captain who had been accepted to the Air Force Academy. Chavez said she yearned to do that legislative work directly, campaigning this year for enhanced criminal penalties and financial incentives for businesses that train and hire people as they leave incarceration to address recidivism.

“I had to wait for my kids to be older and self-sufficient” to run for the Legislature, said Chavez, the sales director at a Medicare provider who campaigned under the banner of “mother, business leader, fighter.” “My youngest is going to be a senior, and he drives now.”

The New Mexico milestone is a counterpoint to the defeat of Kamala Harris nationally, the second female Democratic nominee for president, although Harris won New Mexico. The Legislature convenes on Jan. 21 for 60 days, its only scheduled session in 2025.

Women in New Mexico already dominate the other top echelons of state government — holding the governor’s office over four consecutive terms. Three seats out of five on the state Supreme Court are held by women.

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Women also hold statewide elected office as secretary of state, state treasurer and state public land commissioner — the latter a position overseeing lucrative oil and natural gas lease sales in the No. 2 state for petroleum production.

Kelly Dittmar, director of research at the Center for American Women and Politics, said it was too soon Friday to determine overall changes in representation for women in the general election, with many vote tallies still underway. For a few months in 2024, women held a majority of legislative seats in Arizona. In 2023, women briefly occupied 50% of legislative seats in Colorado.

Dittmar said female legislators who achieve robust representation in legislatures typically cultivate their own supportive network, and that those states also often have formal programs that recruit and encourage women who want to run for office.

Among Democrats, many female legislators in New Mexico trace their initial success at campaigning to the training and support group Emerge and its local chapter, which aren’t directly involved in campaigns. Graduates say the program braces them for the personal demands of campaigning and teaches skills from financial planning to developing effective political messaging.

“It’s sort of the soup-to-nuts of campaigning,” said Democratic state Rep. Reena Szczepanski of Santa Fe, who previously served as executive director at Emerge New Mexico from 2010 to 2016 and was reelected this year to a second House term.

She attended the Emerge training in 2008 alongside a school teacher named Stephanie Garcia Richard, who joined the Legislature and later won statewide election as the first female public land commissioner.

Berghmans, 36, of Albuquerque will join the New Mexico Senate as its youngest member in January after winning 60% of the vote in the general election. In the June primary, she ousted state Sen. Daniel Ivey-Soto in the wake of allegations of sexual harassment and bullying behavior that he disputed. Berghmans said people in her district appeared eager to hear from a new generation of female candidates.

“I did hear a lot of people at the doors who told me to my face that they were willing to vote for me just because I was a young woman,” said Berghmans, who campaigned on solutions to surging homelessness and the housing affordability crisis. “I think that people are excited to see new ideas and new faces and that women have been the ones to step up to run.”

Berghmans, who works at a progressive public policy group after an early career in e-commerce, said she is lucky to have enough family support to juggle work and campaigning for an unsalaried legislative position, while raising a newborn daughter, now 8 months old.

“It has maybe made things more clear,” she said about politics and motherhood. “I really want to work on early childhood care (legislation). ... It’s more tangible and just a little different.”

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