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| MLG and VP Harris |
A 45 minute forum held with MLG and Harris before an audience of 300 at Keller Hall on the UNM Campus focused on reproductive rights, but it was Politics 101 that was really on display. (Full forum video here.)
MLG needs to hold her big lead among women voters. Harris fit the bill and carried out her duties with aplomb, even as some Democrats grumbled that there may be too much focus on abortion at this point and that those crime hits need to be addressed.
Harris and MLG did discuss other issues. At a private fund-raiser prior to the forum Harris said the NM chief executive, who was given consideration for the post of Health and Human Services cabinet secretary at the start of the Biden administration but came up short, was an important voice in the federal child tax credit and on lowering health care costs.
In his response to the Harris visit Ronchetti pivoted to the economy and said he wished that Harris came to the city to focus on inflation and the economy but instead "played politics." He has brought in several GOP A-listers to campaign with him, including Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and former VP Mike Pence.
His campaign had a billboard at the ready outside of Keller Hall featuring the sexual harassment case that MLG settled with a former campaign staffer and they asked how the Veep could support someone who had such baggage.
Vice-President Harris attended that fund-raiser for MLG before the UNM event. It was held at the home of Rudy and Michelle Guzman. Guzman heads up Guzman Construction Solutions. The company is headquartered at Mesa del Sol, the land development in south ABQ in which Guzman is an investor.
About 100 people attend the fund-raiser. Tickets went for $1,450 a pop.
The Harris visit had MLG dominating the important news cycle for a day and pushing aside the crime beat but the visit had to share media space with that new poll that showed Ronchetti running a point ahead, after running behind in every public poll since the June primary.
MORE ON THAT POLL
Trafalgar is a Republican-funded polling operation with a good accuracy record. There's a blog that rates the accuracy of all polling companies, and this particular firm does get an A minus accuracy rating.
That GOP connection is fresh info here. At this point anything connected to the partisan world is going to draw skepticism. We covered the poll in more detail on our Tuesday blog.
Sanderoff's second and final poll for the ABQ Journal on the Guv race (and his first and only one on the congressional races) will be published this Sunday. That first test in late August had MLG leading 47 to 40.
More now about Trafalgar after their little NM bombshell:
The Trafalgar Group is an opinion polling and survey company founded by Robert Cahaly and based in Atlanta, Georgia. It first publicly released polls in 2016. It successfully predicted the result of the 2016 presidential election, but it incorrectly predicted the result of the 2020 presidential election. It also predicted in October and November 2020 that Donald J. Trump would win the states of Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada and Pennsylvania,[1] but Joe Biden ultimately won all of these states. FiveThirtyEight nevertheless included Trafalgar in its list of the most accurate pollsters of the 2020 presidential election.
That "blog" that Sanderoff referred to about Trafalgar is the political website FiveThirtyEight. They factor in the latest polls and political info to set the odds on major political races.
Now that the poll with Ronchetti inching ahead has been included the site's outlook on the race hasn't changed much. They see MLG winning 86 in 100 chances after running various scenarios. That is down slightly from a recent 90 in 100 chances. Ronchetti's winning chances are put at 14 in 100.
WE INTERRUPT THIS BLOG. . .
The Bernalillo County Commission met Tuesday and set a meeting at which they will name a replacement for Candelaria. It will be Halloween, October 31.
The commission will begin taking applications for the vacancy tomorrow but it already looks like a done deal.
ABQ Dem Westside state Rep. Antonio "Moe" Maestas still has the votes to get the seat but with a new twist. Commissioner Adriann Barboa was initially counted as a Moe vote but progressives working to thwart him lobbied Barboa hard and she is no longer in his camp.
So the three Moe votes to make him a Senator are now Dem Commissioners Pyskoty and Quezada and Republican Walt Benson.
If, as expected, he is picked, Maestas would be sworn in at that Oct. 31 meeting. Then there would be a vacancy to fill for his House seat but we'll save that for a later time.
A footnote: One of our Alligators at Tuesday's commission meeting reports that "very rough words" were exchanged between outgoing Commissioners O'Malley and Pyskoty. O'Malley is a Moe foe and was apparently enraged that the meeting to pick Candelaria's successor was not put off until new commissioners take office January 1. She lost that argument and, according to ear witnesses, she also lost her cool with Pyskoty.
This interruption was brought to you by People For A Balanced Blog. We now return you to the never-ending gubernatorial race. . .
NO THIRD ENDORSEMENT
Sun News reporter Algernon D'Ammassa
tells us the paper is out of the endorsement game and today "rarely" puts forth editorial opinions of any kind.
That means our prediction that the Sun-News would be the tie breaker for the endorsements among the state's three major papers will not happen. And that's fine with much of the public, judging by the many newspapers that have stopped the practice.
Some of the papers say the modern atmosphere is too toxic to find common ground in the culture wars or that readers have a hard time knowing what is an opinion and what is a news story. Among papers giving up the endorsement practice is the Denver Post and The Arizona Republic.
TAKE IT DOWN
While newspaper endorsements may be going the way of the typewriter, there's a new practice that is a sign of the times. It's the political campaigns asking TV stations to remove campaign ads they claim are false.
MLG did it this month with KOB, saying the Ronchetti crime ad accusing her of releasing a deadly criminal was false and should be pulled. The station refused.
Now the Ronchetti campaign has joined them and is asking local TV network affiliates to pull an MLG ad that they say falsely describes him as being opposed to all abortion. The affiliates are keeping the ads on.
In only rare cases are political ads pulled. The campaigns are better off getting up a fast rebuttal ad but a new generation of consultants seems to believe that anything negative said about their candidates is grounds for an appeal. It isn't.
AMENDMENT DEBATE (CONT.)
Reader Ron Nelson asked how the money from constitutional Amendment 1 will be spent. The answer is to expand existing high-quality programs like home visiting, child care assistance and pre-kindergarten. Exactly how the money is divided between those programs will be determined through the normal appropriations process.
That is: departments submit their budgets for the coming year to the Legislature (in this case that will be the Early Childhood Education and Care Department). The Legislature then creates and passes the annual budget, which is enacted when the governor signs it. This annual budgeting process takes into account not just how the money will be spent, but looks at whether spending in past years has yielded the expected results. This analysis is done by the Legislative Finance Committee. In their 2021 report on early childhood, they determined that the pre-kindergarten cohort from the 2008 school year had a 10% higher college-going rate than did their peers who did not receive pre-K. That is a significant change.
This also points to one of the things voters need to remember about investing in early childhood programs: it's a marathon not a sprint. While children who receive these programs generally have improved outcomes right away, it can take years before many improvements can be fully seen.
In the case of college attendance, it will take 14 years before we realize that benefit for today's 4-year-olds. When it comes to the well-being of our children--who are not only our future workforce, but also our future parents--we believe the investments we make today are well worth the wait for the accrued outcomes. After all, children only grow up once, so our window of opportunity to make those investments is short. The benefits, however, last a lifetime.
MORE INTERESTING
Joe, one thing is certain this election year. The weather on Channel 13 has gotten a whole lot more interesting since Mark Ronchetti left to run for governor.
Yep. No argument there.
The pic is of new KRQE-TV meteorologist, Zoe Mintz.
As far as we know Zoe has no future political plans.
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(c)NM POLITICS WITH JOE MONAHAN 2022
(c)NM POLITICS WITH JOE MONAHAN 2022