Moderate Republicans in New Mexico have been losing ground in the wake of Trump’s loss of the 2020 election and GOP State Chair Steve Pearce’s simultaneous efforts to steer the party towards a total embrace of Trumpism. While this has energized the far-right base, it also appears to have rubbed moderates and swing voters the wrong way.
A day after the January 6 attack on the Capitol, New Mexico’s GOP issued a statement acknowledging that “our democracy has been tarnished.” However, they were moved to comment not because of the shocking violence that upended the congressional procedure underway that day, but rather due to the ultimate certification of President Biden’s Electoral College victory.
As recently as 2016, Republicans were doing well in New Mexico, with GOP Governor Susana Martinez having just won reelection, Albuquerque’s Republican mayor Richard Berry in his second term, and Republicans winning control of the state House. But just eight years later, Democrats now hold the governorship and a near-supermajority in the state House.
In short, in 2024 New Mexico’s GOP is fractured and struggling, beholden to a right-wing, MAGA base, while floundering to regain support from more moderate suburban voters. “The party’s being ripped down the middle, and I think I’m gonna blame Trump for that,” said an oil industry businessman and longtime Republican donor in the state.
The following are among the state GOP leaders who have spread misinformation about widespread voter fraud or expressed unfettered loyalty to Trump and his ongoing claim that any election he doesn’t win is “rigged”:
- Steve Pearce | Chair
Steve Pearce is a former congressman who served seven terms in the House (2003–09 and 2011–19), where he was associated with the Tea Party and the far-right House Freedom Caucus. Although his 2018 bid for governor failed, he was elected chair of the state GOP that year and has served in that role ever since. Politico sees him as “something of an avatar of the party’s Trumpian brand of politics [who] fully embraced the narrative of a stolen election.” On January 9, 2021, he tweeted: “God bless President Donald J. Trump. He will be our President FOREVER and no one can take that away from us.” - Tina Dziuk | National Committeewoman
Tina Dziuk has been a national committeewoman since 2020 and won reelection in April 2024. According to her campaign bio, she was appointed to the Republican National Committee’s Election Integrity Committee in 2021 and served as co-chair of the Voting Systems and Technology Subcommittee. For the 2022 midterm elections, Dziuk got the RNC to provide New Mexico with a statewide incident reporting system and on Election Day, she served as a poll watcher “responding directly to voter complaints, in real time, while consulting attorneys in the war-room.” Dziuk amplifies election misinformation on social media, often retweeting posts from extremists like Charlie Kirk of Turning Point USA and Dinesh D’Souza, the conspiracy theorist who has made a series of highly controversial political films, including the debunked 2022 pro-Trump documentary 2000 Mules. - Rebecca Dow | CD–2 Vice Chair
Rebecca Dow is a former state representative who lost in the GOP primary for governor in 2022, and is running to regain her seat in the state legislature in 2024. As a candidate, she disparaged other Republicans for being “never Trumpers” and ran ads to that effect. She has also endorsed 2000 Mules, the widely debunked conspiracy theory film about the 2020 election. - Robert Witsenhausen | Santa Fe County Chair
In his monthly letters to fellow Republicans, Robert Witsenhausen stirs up distrust of the electoral process, referring to automatic voter registration as “a recipe for stealing elections,” claiming that in the past poll workers “were observed breaking numerous rules,” and that “every time they accused us of something, we were proven right.” In his letter from June 2023 he wrote, “The propaganda against Republicans has been laid on thick. Who can forget Biden’s ‘Red Sermon’ speech, with all the Nazi imagery of a Leni Riefenstahl production? And don’t even get me started on January 6th.” In his letter from May 2024, Witsenhausen urged Republicans to vote in the June 4 primary, noting, “Everyone should flood the ballot box and show the entire country that in New Mexico it’s going to be ‘Too Big to Rig.’” - Julianne (Julie) Stroup | Sierra County Chair
In a July 2021 email to Kari Fresquez (then the state elections director in New Mexico), Julie Stroup wrote that the proposed rule changes for voting in New Mexico—including the use of drop boxes and mail-in ballots—would “only ensure that cheating in elections will be easier and difficult to prevent.” She also argued that “voting in person on voting day is the only way to substantially reduce interference in our elections,” and that “mail-in ballots other than absentee ballots also have proven to be an easy avenue to interfere with fair elections. We saw this during the 2020 election cycle.” - Sarah Hawkes Valente | Taos County Chair
A May 2023 opinion piece by Sarah Hawkes Valente encouraged residents to sign petitions for a referendum against several pending bills, including HB-4 and SB-180, which she claimed “could lead to potential fraud in our election process.” She also wrote that felony voter enfranchisement “is a potential threat to election integrity,” and that the provisions in SB-180 allowing for electronic signature gathering for nominating petitions and voter convenience centers “could lead to voter fraud.” - John Brenna | Valencia County Chair
John Brenna repeatedly reposts election-related conspiracy theories and other disinformation about election integrity on his personal Twitter/X page, linking to an article exonerating Trump for his inaction on January 6 by noting: “The J6 committee buried the whistleblower accounts because they were devastating to the narrative Donald Trump was complicit in an ‘insurrection.’” In a March 2024 post, he wrote: “Approximately 9,000 previously uncounted mail-in ballots from an Illinois election were suddenly ‘found.’” And that same month, he reposted a lengthy conspiracy piece arguing that “Democrats are importing illegals because they plan on stealing the election… & if it starts an uprising, 10 million military age males with no allegiance to America and contempt for Americans will be all too happy to help squash it [in exchange] for citizenship.”