Possibly my favorite thing about writing this column is interacting with readers. That goes for the critical comments as well as the positive. I try to reply as my day job and bourbon consumption allow.
(Here’s a tip: if you want to criticize me, please make it conversational. Screeds that just focus on calling me a fascist/RINO/moron with no contribution to the political debate do not receive replies. Pejorative profanity gets blocked. Repeat screeds get blocked. I mean, I understand it is probably pretty fun and cathartic each week to break out the keyboard and tell me what a fascist/RINO/moron I am, but please know it’s going straight to the spam folder after the second message.)
Every now and then I get what is for a pundit high praise: A suggestion I run for office. I simply cannot think of enough swear words to put in front of my very emphatic “no.” For print propriety standards, I’ll just say, “hell, no.”
I have seen the good side of public office – watching a family member really enjoy public service representing her community and supporting her constituents. I’ve also experienced first-hand the awfulness of campaigning in the 21st century. And primary voters are a big part of the problem. Allow me to explain.
The ongoing and ever-increasing political polarization and culture wars of this century have made primary election campaigning a true ideological minefield. Key to any campaign is the grassroots effort, which in New Mexico mostly means knocking on doors.
Door-to-door campaigning in the past has been a proven way to connect with your voters and help them connect with your campaign and values. The problem is, in recent years, national-level tribal issues have taken over the real issues that affect our lives in a more direct way.
For most legislative and even statewide elections, the issues to bring up when knocking on doors used to be jobs, the economy and education for both Democrats and Republicans. No more. Now it’s abortion, guns, and more recently, immigration. This is what voters want to hear about. And you must be very, very careful saying what you really think. None of these issues are black and white. But special interest groups, biased media outlets and straight up disinformation campaigns on the internet have made many primary voters “all or nothing” on these issues.
Depending on which party you are in, your answers will have to be:
Abortion: either a total ban, or complete access up to the day of delivery (i.e. Texas or New Mexico)
Guns: either everyone can have as many of any type on demand with no restriction or waiting period, or law-abiding gun owners must store their firearms in their homes unloaded in a safe (i.e., Mississippi or Massachusetts)
Immigration: something has to be done, but we aren’t sure what (the parties seem to have the same non-position and in 2024, the Democratic Congressional caucus seems willing to take a harder line while the GOP fiddles in the flames).
Hitting the pavement knocking doors, you could never say, “I think abortion should be legal until (16, 20) weeks and then allowed for medical reasons or in cases of rape or incest.” You could never say, “The problem is we have too many guns in circulation, and any regulations will impact law-abiding citizens more than criminals. But we have to try something.” But you know what? I bet, if polled, most Americans would agree with both statements.
And here’s the other thing. If you have said anything on these tribal topics in the past, they will be used against you. In other words, if you have an opinion, keep it to your ownself, please, and just make something up for the election.
Here’s how this can work. I was on NMPBS the week that the Las Vegas mass shooting happened in the fall of 2017. I opined on air that I thought Congress would have to take up the issue of after-market bump stocks and also gave some background on the National Firearms Act of 1934 which proscribed the public from owning military-grade weapons.
Fast forward to the spring of 2018 when I was running for the Legislature. My opponent’s campaign took that NMPBS clip and manipulated it to show me saying inane things about guns and making wild accusations about gun show operators. The campaign happily took this clip on their phones door to door and told voters I was anti-gun. When I mentioned this to my opponent at a community event, he was completely confused – he had never seen the original clip and the campaign didn’t tell him it was doctored. So he felt perfectly fine pushing out the lie, since he didn’t know any better.
By the time I got to neighborhoods, many had already seen the clip, as campaign surrogates simply went out with the campaign message and a fake video that I didn’t like guns. My opponent didn’t even have to say what he stood for, which was handy. My platform was irrelevant. It was all guns, all the time on the campaign trail.
For the record, I have owned a handgun since the age of 17. To my knowledge, I was the first student to bring a firearm on campus at the University of Notre Dame, to the amusement of campus security and the shock of my roommate from New York. I feel this is (1) fairly solid pro-gun bona fides and (2) completely irrelevant to my fitness as an elected legislator.
So when I was roundly beaten in the first week of June 2018, I certainly felt like no one cared about issues or real opinions. And I started posting on social media what I really thought about the President, the GOP, Democrats, and the state of the world; not what I felt I had to say to be elected. Trust me, there was a tremendous difference.
It felt amazing. And that November, the publisher of The Independent asked me if I would consider writing a column. Since then, the column has been picked up by a few other papers in Silver City, Las Cruces, Alamogordo, Deming, and Carlsbad. The acquisition of The Independent by Ctrl+P has seen it added to that family of independent papers around the Albuquerque metro area.
And the best part? Punditry in New Mexico pays exactly what legislators here earn: Nothing.
This has gone on too long in self-indulgent reminiscence, but there is a message for voters in here somewhere. Please: Ask questions of candidates that relate to your livelihood, your safety, and your children’s future. Refuse to play a part in the political tribalism this year and make a stand for substance. Our state and our nation depend on it.
Merritt Hamilton Allen is a PR executive and former Navy officer. She appeared regularly as a panelist on NM PBS and is a frequent guest on News Radio KKOB. A Republican, she lives amicably with her Democratic husband north of I-40 where they run one head of dog, and two of cat. She can be reached at news.ind.merritt@gmail.com.
As a practicing psychologist who has overcome my NYC fear, having come from there, I am fascinated by the ways in which fear has become the coin of the realm everywhere across this vast, expansive nation of ours including in the East Mountains. What shall we be afraid of today and why? What shall we do about it?
Basic psych will tell you that our earliest input will be the most influential in molding our attitudes and, unless we somehow broaden our understanding, we will just repeat the prejudices that were instilled in us early with ever deepening convictions that are very likely based on nothing or very little other than what we have been told, messages that are repeated in the echo chamber of media, from our family, neighbors, and friends. But, now, if you know something different than what are accepted beliefs, you are subject to attack. How might you react to neighbors who lack the interest to investigate or discuss? You probably will get antagonistic yourself. If you can’t do this, what can you do to try to solve problems with your neighbor?
In NY, I was afraid of everything. If the news reported that someone was thrown on the subway tracks, suddenly everyone on the subway became an existential threat. And the way our brains work, including mine, we analyze what we think may be the cause of the problem. The most readily available sorting process is by appearance, which means by race.
But, recalling my experience as a teenager when I was encouraged and contemplated shoplifting as a means of meeting basic needs in NYC, it was the white store manager who rounded me up, along with my friend whom I had lost track of and was apprehended with some cheese in his coat. (I had already decided that stealing was too stressful and not worth the reward.). Too late! The manager ordered the two store workers with us to beat us up. Those young men looked scared, the manager angry. The threat was aborted by a very elegantly dressed AA man with his equally good looking blond date, who sprung us from this very uncomfortable situation. What could I have possibly learned from this? I learned that shoplifting was not worth it, that not all AA people are bad and some will act on principle to defend another. Moreover, not all white people are good. Well, so if this is not about race, what is it all about? Answer: it is about observing and learning.
Now that we are into this, what else can we learn from our experience? How about from history? Thanks to the media most people believe that the immigration problem just started and they want to blame the president of whichever party. Well, since we don’t teach history anymore at least not in any depth, we may be forgiven if we think that this issue is of recent vintage. It is not. It has been fought over in this country for a very long time. (Look it up.). My grandmother could neither read nor write, but she could clean houses and did, until she started getting welfare when she was retirement age and could afford to rent with my grandfather an apartment in the housing projects in Bedford Stuyvesant, one of the worst neighborhoods to live in at the time. What can we learn from this? Whatever her limitations, she could work and did work, doing the very things that most people did not want to do, cleaning up after others. And her children worked and her grandchildren worked, some having gotten advanced degrees. Did we want these people in our country? Do we want people like this in our country now?
Abortion? We are a country that talks about our basic freedoms, but is there any basis for any one of us telling another what they should do with their own bodies during times of pregnancy? Should we leave it to the experts, men, people who can’t get pregnant or post-menopausal women?
Guns? With all the fear of others being reinforced throughout the media, do we really want the uninformed to make decisions about what is a danger and what isn’t? Okay. It’s not the guns. It’s the people. But we don’t teach them anything and nothing is to be taken from it.
These issues aren’t political so much as personal. What can we take from these experiences? What can we learn? This is not nor should be a time for Hester Prynne. We shouldn’t be persecuting people without a full set of facts about the current situation and about the history.