Thousands of people watched former president Donald Trump speak Thursday at an airport hangar in Albuquerque, a late visit to a state he is unlikely to win but where his supporters gave him a joyous welcome.
With polls showing New Mexico is unlikely to be in play in the presidential election, the former president urged the crowd to prove the predictions wrong. He hit familiar themes like the border and gas price inflation and enthusiastically praised Hispanic communities.
The rally was only announced on Sunday, and after a few days of scrambling over parking and location, Trump’s supporters had to park far away, get buses, walk and stand in long long lines. It didn’t bother many of them one bit.
“It’s great,” said Jose Hernandez, a small business owner from Albuquerque, who was buying a shirt from a stall selling MAGA hats in every color and gold sneakers.
“There’s a lot of people that are very happy that he’s here. We talked with a lot of people in line and stuff like that. So everybody’s excited.”
Like many people here today, he is a Hispanic New Mexican, a constituency that has traditionally voted Democrat. He switched parties, as did Thomas Hernandez, no relation as far as KUNM is aware, who was standing in line with a Trump flag and two Trump hats.
“I came from a Democratic family, and I was indoctrinated to vote Democrat,” he said. He credits the party with helping his parents work their way out of poverty. “I grew up as a Chicano person in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and I saw the policies that the Democrats had when we were growing up.”
He thinks it is much harder for people to lift themselves up economically now. When asked what the biggest issue is in this election, like many others he said the border and specifically fentanyl smuggling.
“My daughter died of fentanyl,” he said. “And I’ve had multiple family friends that have had incidents of somebody in their family, having overdoses or being addicted to that fentanyl.”
And he blames the current administration.
“The border czar, comrade Kamala, she didn’t do anything for us down there.”
Inside the hangar, as the crowd waited for the main event, they heard from speakers including Myron Lizer, the former Vice President of the Navajo Nation, who struck a note of unity.
“There’s an Indian proverb out there. It says, the left wing and the right wing are of the same bird,” he said.
And the Republican candidate for the state’s most competitive congressional district, Yvette Herrell, spoke. The 2nd Congressional District in the south of the state is nearly 60% Hispanic and she is running against a Mexican-American Democrat, Gabe Vasquez. She touched on regular themes of hers: transgender athletes, border security and immigration.
“When you vote to allow men in girls sports, when you don’t stand up for the parents rights, when you call the wall disrespectful and a waste of money, when you allow to have illegals vote in our elections, not once, twice,” she said.
Noncitizens attempting to vote actually occurs extremely rarely, according to studies from the Brennan Center of Justice and investigations like an audit of voting rolls in Georgia this year.
As the former president arrived, touching down against a backdrop of the craggy Sandia mountains and a perfect blue sky, he told the crowd why he’d come, so close to the election.
“I’m here for one simple reason. I like you very much, and it’s good for my credentials with the Hispanic or Latino community,” he said.
He asked whether people in New Mexico preferred the term Latino or Hispanic, with big cheers for Hispanic.
“First of all, Hispanics love Trump,” he declared, saying they were “entrepreneurial”.
“But you have to turn out the record numbers that we need in order to really demand a better future. And you have to go out. You have to vote. We want to win, win, win.”
He almost acknowledged he is unlikely to win the state
“They all said: Don’t come. I said, why? You can’t win New Mexico. I said, Look, your votes are rigged. We can win New Mexico. We can win New Mexico.”
He made many false claims, including that he had won the state twice before. He did not and New Mexico’s 2022 election was ranked best in the nation by the Elections Performance Index at MIT.
A somber note came with a video of the mother of a 12 year old girl murdered earlier this year in Houston, allegedly by two undocumented men from Venezuela.
“Under Kamala, New Mexico has seen millions of people pour across your section of the southern border,” he said. Customs and Border Protection records about half a million encounters on New Mexico’s border since the beginning of Fiscal Year 2021.
Trump used familiar language — “tough hombres” — to describe immigrants and mentioned the number 13,099 as a number of murderers crossing the border during the last administration. The Department of Homeland Security has said that he is misrepresenting that figure and that it goes back decades.
He also mentioned immigrants flooding towns with deadly drugs, but the majority of people arrested smuggling fentanyl into the country are American citizens, according to reporting from KPBS in California.
Among several Hispanic and other people on the way out, his message had resonated. Lisa Parsons is from an old New Mexican family.
“It’s wonderful that he recognizes us and all cultures, not just one-sided culture, but many cultures, that’s what he’s reaching out to,” she said.
Amid long lines of traffic and closed roads, there were no big protests, but Joel Hernandez from the Party of Socialism and Liberation told KUNM he led about 40 people to demonstrate nearby. They chanted against deportations and against war, and said some Trump supporters yelled slurs at them, but there were no confrontations.
Ten days ago, New Mexican Republican Ronnie Lucero posted on X before heading to a Trump golf resort in Miami to attend the Republican candidate’s Latino Summit. He wrote, “I am going to ask President Trump to come to New Mexico now that we are within the margin of error of flipping red.”
He says his conversation with Trump was maybe 15 seconds long, and he does not take credit, but when the rally was confirmed, Lucero was jubilant. He is the former chair of the Republican National Hispanic Assembly, and has the fervor of a convert.
“I was a Democrat,” he said. “I actually voted for Bill Clinton, and when George Bush became president, I voted for Bush. I voted for Obama his first election, and I voted against him in the second election.”
As he got more involved in politics he felt his values and his identity were pulling him to the right.
“It became more clear to me that I was very conservative. And, you know, our values as a Hispanic community are very conservative.”
As former President Donald Trump stops in Albuquerque for a rally Thursday, his decision to call on New Mexico so close to the election might seem surprising. Polls suggest his Democratic opponent, Vice President Kamala Harris, is set to win by several points.
But Trump’s visit fits into a concerted effort. New Mexico is the state with the highest proportion of Hispanic voters, about 45%, coming from many backgrounds, including centuries-old families and recent immigrants. And Republicans are working to win them over up and down the ballot.
“The Republican Party of New Mexico has made a pretty strong effort to get more of the Hispanic representation in the party itself,” said Lucero, whose day job is selling used cars in Albuquerque.
For example, KUNM found that in the four state Senate races which Republicans lost by the smallest margin last time, the party is running Hispanic candidates this time around. And a report last year by the news outlet Axios found a record number of Hispanic New Mexicans running as Republicans for the state House of Representatives.
Lucero says the party is working to appeal to Hispanic voters’ core values: family, culture, economic opportunity and freedom.
But of those, he says the most important argument right now is the economy. Hispanic households here are a bit more likely to be family households, and household income is lower than that of white families.
“So inflation is actually hitting our families a lot more,” he said.
He also said he makes arguments around public safety. The Albuquerque Police Department said last year that most victims and suspects of homicide are Hispanic.
Lucero says the campaign has been going door to door and holding events specifically focused on the Hispanic community. The New York Post reported last week that conservative groups are spending $5 million on Spanish-language ads here in the final stretch of the campaign.
Lucero does not focus as much on issues like abortion, or the rights of transgender people. But some Hispanic Republicans do. Gabriel Ramos is running for state senator in Southern New Mexico, and he also switched sides after in 2019 joining a group of Democrats who voted to keep an abortion ban from the 1960s on the state’s books.
“The liberal/progressive movement that’s going on, I just didn’t agree with,” he said. “I just felt that I needed to become a Republican.”
He said the Democratic party has changed since it dominated the unions in the mining community in which he grew up.
If the miners were alive today, he said, “I don’t think that if they really looked at what the parties stood for, I don’t think that most of them would agree with most of the Democrat values.”
And the real reason for Trump’s visit might lie in a race where the candidates are vying ferociously for Hispanic voters: the 2nd Congressional District in southern New Mexico, which is nearly 60% Hispanic.
Nationally, the race to control the House of Representatives is a toss-up, and this contest is one of the tightest in the country. Democratic candidate Gabe Vasquez, who is from a Mexican immigrant family, won by a whisker two years ago and insists he’ll win again.
“There’s a narrative that we are losing Latinos to the Republican Party, and to folks that say that in my district, I would say that that couldn’t be further from the truth,” he said.
He pointed out that a Hispanic outreach center that opened last election season, when Republican candidate Yvette Herrell was in office, in Albuquerque’s heavily Hispanic South Valley, and promised pizza parties and job fairs, has since closed.
“That was at a place where Republicans had a press conference and had vowed that they would do a better job of attracting Latino communities and Hispanic voters,” he said.
Herrell is running again this time and is expected to speak at the Trump rally. In an email statement to KUNM, Vianca Rodriguez, the Trump Campaign Deputy Director of Hispanic Communications, said, “The Trump campaign’s Latino outreach strategy is a comprehensive, all-hands-on-deck effort,” saying that Latino Americans for Trump staff are working in GOP offices in heavily Hispanic areas across Arizona, Nevada, and Georgia. She also referred to the Vice President as “Que Mala” (translation: how bad!) Kamala Harris.
Republicans looking for reasons to be optimistic in New Mexico have pointed to a recent poll that showed Harris with only a three point lead, though Source New Mexico reports that poll was conducted by a firm owned by Kellyanne Conway, a former spokesperson for Trump.
State Representative Stephani Lord (R-Sandia Park) told Newsmax this week, “what I’m hearing in New Mexico is a lot of people that were not going to support Trump previously are totally on board with him. I’m talking about our Hispanic voters.”
She did not offer any evidence and most polls show Harris with a convincing lead. The chair of the Democratic Party of New Mexico, Jessica Velasquez, said her party has long done a better job representing the Hispanic community.
“You know, the Democratic Party has always had Hispanic candidates at the federal level for years,” she said. “The overwhelming majority of Hispanic state legislators in both chambers in Santa Fe are Democrats. There are only a handful of Hispanic Republicans.”
Still, KUNM spoke to a few Democrats who think their party needs to not take Hispanics for granted, like the former Democratic mayor of Las Vegas, Louie Trujillo.
“I’m surprised at how many Trump supporters there are in northern New Mexico,” he said. “Younger people, younger than me. Those are the Gen Z voters, who people were hoping to get out and capture that Democratic vote.”
He remembers an enthusiastic Obama campaign in Las Vegas in 2008 and feels the national party could up its game in New Mexico today. In heavily Hispanic Mora County, County Commissioner Veronica Serna, another Democrat, also sounded a note of caution.
“Especially because it’s always been predominantly Democrat, I don’t think we can just assume that it’s going to continue being that way,” she said. “I think that, especially for the younger voters, they have a mind of their own.”
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