Heath Haussamen / NMPolitics.net
The line to vote at Desert Hills Elementary in Las Cruces stretched out the door on Tuesday morning.
At 8:56 a.m., the line to vote at Desert Hills Elementary School in Las Cruces was out the door and stretched almost to the parking lot. There were more than 30 people in line to vote.
A few miles away and 20 minutes later, there was a short line to vote at Good Samaritan Village. Poll workers said there was a longer line earlier in the morning. At 10 a.m. there was a steady stream of voters showing up to that polling place. There was also a steady stream of voters, but no line, at the nearby Farm and Ranch Heritage Museum at 11:15 a.m.
That appeared to be how things were going across much of Doña Ana County on Tuesday. Chief Deputy County Clerk Lindsey Bachman tweeted just after 10 a.m. that total turnout from the 2014 midterm elections had already been exceeded, with hours left to vote before the polls close at 7 p.m. And a website showing estimated wait times to vote at polling places in Doña Ana County consistently showed that there were lines of voters at several locations in and around Las Cruces throughout the morning.
At 10:45 a.m., the estimated wait to vote at Desert Hills was 92 minutes. It was 17 minutes at Thomas Branigan Memorial Library in downtown Las Cruces, 14 minutes at Sonoma Elementary, 11 minutes at Las Cruces High, and 10 minutes at the elementary school down the road in Anthony.
By 10:30 a.m., 3,293 people had voted in Doña Ana County on Election Day, the Secretary of State’s Office said. Some 46 percent were Democrats; 34 percent were Republicans.
That’s actually good news for Republicans. Some 46 percent of the county’s registered voters are Democrats, and 26 percent are Republicans. So Republicans may be making up on Election Day, at least to some degree, for the fact that early voting was higher among Democrats, relative to voter registration, than Republicans.
But the county’s total voting still favors Democrats. The total number of Democrats who voted early, absentee and in person by 10:30 a.m. on Election Day added up to 52 percent of the county’s total vote. Republicans had 31 percent of the total vote.
Heath Haussamen / NMPolitics.net
There was a steady stream of voters at Good Samaritan Village in Las Cruces on Tuesday morning.
Turnout in Doña Ana County, the state’s second largest in terms of population, is important for many races. It’s especially important for the race to replace Steve Pearce in the U.S. House of Representatives — where Las Cruces is the Democratic stronghold in an otherwise red district that’s roughly the size of Pennsylvania.
Polls have revealed an extremely close race between Republican Yvette Herrell and Democrat Xochitl Torres Small in that race. The most recent, an Albuquerque Journal poll, had Herrell leading by 1 percentage point. In that poll, Torres Small led 55 percent to 36 percent in Las Cruces and southwestern New Mexico, while Herrell led 62 percent to 30 percent in southeastern New Mexico.
“It’s extremely close,” Brian Sanderoff, president of Research & Polling, which conducted the poll, told the Journal. “I think the deciding factor in this race will be which side is more successful in turning out their supporters on Election Day.”
Doña Ana County residents who support Torres Small would have to turn out in higher numbers than usual for her to win. Turnout so far seems to indicate there’s a chance that’s happening — if high voting continues in Doña Ana County through the rest of Election Day. But we won’t know until we have final numbers.
The race between Herrell and Torres Small is considered one of the closest U.S. House contests in the nation. It’s also been one of the most expensive in state history. The congressional district has been represented by a Democrat only once since the state got a third congressional district in the 1980s.