Courtesy photo
Xochitl Torres Small
A day after several news outlets prematurely declared that Democrat Xochitl Torres Small had lost the race to replace Steve Pearce in the U.S. House, she came from behind to win.
Torres Small won almost 78 percent of absentee ballots cast in Doña Ana County — votes that weren’t tallied until about 24 hours after the polls closed and kept this race up in the air throughout Wednesday. That huge boost took her from trailing Republican Yvette Herrell by 1,840 votes to leading by 2,724.
There are about 1,000 provisional ballots left to consider in Doña Ana County. That isn’t enough to give Herrell a chance to catch up, especially given that the county’s voters have heavily favored Torres Small. She won 64.24 percent of the vote in Doña Ana County.
District-wide, Torres Small has 99,440 votes, or 50.7 percent, to Herrell’s 96,712 votes, or 49.3 percent. Torres Small’s lead is big enough to avoid the automatic, state-funded recount that state law mandates if the margin is less than 0.25 percent.
A candidate could still request — and pay for — a recount of the entire district or individual counties. But Herrell isn’t taking that route, for now. She also isn’t conceding the race.
Instead, Herrell’s campaign said late Wednesday it would wait for determinations on all provisional ballots districtwide. Those are ballots cast by people who don’t appear on voter rolls or have other questions raised about their eligibility to vote. Historically, high percentages of those ballots are rejected and never counted. And it’s likely the majority of the 1,000 provisionals cast in Doña Ana County would favor Torres Small.
In the meantime, Democrats were celebrating.
“I congratulate Representative-elect Xochitl Torres Small on her stunning victory,” said U.S. Rep. Ben Ray Luján, D-N.M., who chairs the House Democrats’ campaign committee, which spent big to help elect Torres Small.
“As the first Latina to represent this district, Xochitl is breaking ground that will expand opportunities for all New Mexicans,” Luján said. “Xochitl understands the needs of the people in southern New Mexico and will be a champion for our rural communities.”
We always knew the race would hinge on whether Democrats in Doña Ana County turned out in high enough numbers to offset voting in Republican-leaning counties in the eastern part of the district, which is roughly the size of Florida.
And yet the turnaround was still stunning. Election Day votes from Doña Ana County were late to come in because a surge of voting before the polls closed had many people in line to vote well past 7 p.m. So early results came mostly from red-leaning counties, and Herrell led by several thousand votes.
But Torres Small slowly cut into Herrell’s lead throughout Tuesday evening. She cut that lead to 2,344 votes, or about 1.75 percent, at about 12:45 a.m. on Wednesday, and then to 1,986 votes, or 1.56 percent, shortly thereafter.
Many were skeptical Torres Small could make up the difference. Herrell declared victory late Tuesday, thanking voters for “keeping New Mexico moving in the right direction in terms of holding on to our conservative voice.” Several news organizations declared Herrell the winner.
But Torres Small saw the uncertainty given the uncounted absentee ballots in Doña Ana County and announced at 11:15 p.m. on Tuesday that she wasn’t conceding yet. She said all votes should be counted.
Herrell’s lead remained fairly steady most of Wednesday, even as 700 outstanding ballots in Cibola County were counted. And we waited for the thousands of absentee ballots in Doña Ana County, which the clerk said were delayed because her office wasn’t prepared to process an unprecedented number of absentee votes so quickly.
Those votes from Doña Ana County, as it turned out, made all the difference in the race.
“The good thing is that our vote is our voice,” Torres Small said during a celebration at her campaign headquarters after she won.
Later Wednesday, Herrell’s campaign latched onto Torres Small’s words about the importance of counting all votes.
“Last night, we heard from Xochitl Torres Small that it was extremely important that every vote be counted,” Rob Burgess, a senior adviser to Herrell’s campaign, said in a statement. “This campaign believes that should be the case, and we look forward to seeing the results from all provisional ballots throughout the district.”
Neither campaign responded on Wednesday to requests from NMPolitics.net for interviews with the candidates.
Torres Small is set in January to become the first woman and the first Latino to represent New Mexico’s 2nd Congressional District. She’ll be only the second Democrat to represent the district since New Mexico earned a third congressional district in the early 1980s, which set up the 2nd District as a GOP stronghold. Democrat Harry Teague held the seat for two years, from 2009-2010.
Torres Small campaigned on a pledge to be an independent, moderate voice and someone who would work with Republicans and Democrats alike. That may be a difficult line to toe in these divided times — and whether she can appease voters in a conservative-leaning district remains to be seen. Voters booted Teague out of office two years after giving him a shot at the job.
I wrote a column in 2010 analyzing why Teague lost. If you’re interested, you can read it by clicking here.
This breaking news article has been updated.