The Hot Shot Democrat You've Never Heard Of

The author, a Princeton professor, reports from the campaign trail on a New Mexico congressional race that could make history.

I’m here in Albuquerque to volunteer for the Democrat Martin Heinrich’s campaign in the final election stretch. Once a long-shot candidate, Heinrich has turned the race around. If he pulls off a win, it would mark a minor revolution in New Mexico politics. While many of my friends and colleagues from Princeton are on the trail for Obama this weekend, I decided my energy would be better spent on a tighter race.

The recent polls show our man is up by at least three points. The early-voter turnout, which figures to be heavily Democratic, is abnormally high. The local Republicans’ tactics are getting dirty, even by Lee Atwater/Karl Rove standards, but their campaign is also running away from President Bush like a burglar caught at the scene of the crime.

This race exemplifies the big political changes that are taking place all over the country this year. New Mexico’s 1st Congressional District, which includes Albuquerque and its adjoining rural counties, has chosen a Republican ever since the current district lines were drawn in 1969—through the failed Nixon presidency and then the entire age of Ronald Reagan. Yet the Republican incumbent, Heather Wilson, a standard-issue Reaganite, just barely survived the 2006 nationwide Democratic uprising. And this year, Wilson vacated her post to pursue an ultimately unsuccessful bid for her party’s nomination to the US Senate, making New Mexico One (as I’ve learned to call it) an open seat, for which both parties are always prepared to fight like hell. The campaign looms as one the Democrats might actually win, marking the end of a political era in Albuquerque in the same year one could end in the nation at large.

The Republican, Darren White, a George W. Bush Republican, has been a rising star within the New Mexico GOP, a no-nonsense former Houston cop and the local chair of Bush’s campaign in 2004 who went on two years later to win a second term as sheriff of Bernalillo County with 63 percent of the vote. Heinrich, an active environmentalist, has been a popular reform-minded Albuquerque city councilman since 2004. Heinrich also won, in 2006, the semi-official title of “hottest man in American politics” in an odd nationwide competition—literally a beauty contest—run by the Politics1.com website. Hot or not, Heinrich began the campaign 18 points down in the polls—partly the result of White’s zeal as a law enforcement media hound.

The race started shifting Heinrich’s way early this fall, even before the Wall Street catastrophe transformed the political scene. At the end of September, a Department of Justice report implicated White in the continuing scandal involving the partisan firing of US attorneys in 2006. And since the financial meltdown, the White campaign has been sinking. Asked recently by the local paper how he would grade Bush’s performance, White—Bush’s own local campaign chairman four years ago—gave him a “D.” Cutting its losses, perhaps prematurely, the National Republican Campaign Committee has pulled its financial resources out of the race, leaving the state party and White’s own supporters to soldier on, with the help of the right-wing propaganda group Freedom’s Watch, run out of D.C. by a clutch of White House cronies. White’s ads have also turned sharply negative, falsely accusing Heinrich of dishonoring American troops in Iraq and of having nefarious ties to eco-terrorists.

From all I’d read about Heinrich, and heard about him from friends, the attacks seemed more desperate than fearsome, especially coming this late in the game. Heinrich looks like a solid candidate on a solid roll, the same roll that Democrats everywhere are enjoying this year. But when his staffer Rebekah Walker dropped me off at my hotel, I felt uneasy about the slender margin in the polling—and became interested all over again in doing what I could to help the hottest man in American politics, about whom almost all of America as yet knows nothing.