As always, click on all pictures for the larger version.  And you can see the rest at my Flickr page

Crossposted at New Mexico FBIHOP

Saturday, I followed Tom Udall around the city, starting up in the Northeast Heights at Page One, the largest independent bookstore in the state.

Page One Town Hall

The event at Page One was a town hall meeting, where about 100 people showed up to hear Udall give a short speech and ask the Congressman questions.

Udall began the speech by telling about his accomplishments both as the Attorney General and as a Congressman.  He mentioned he voted against the war in Iraq and said, "We should have stayed in Afghanistan; we should have captured Osama bin Laden."

Crossposted at New Mexico FBIHOP

Click on photos for larger versions.  More available on my Flickr page, as always.

Democratic Caucus Chairman Rahm Emanuel of Illinois was in the state and saw a good chunk of it in a short period of time -- at least up and down I-25.  

I'm not quite sure where he met up with Second Congressional District candidate Harry Teague for a fundraiser, but Emanuel stopped by Gabriel's Restaurant north of Santa Fe for a fundraiser and quick talk with the press (which is to mean myself and Steve Terrell of the Santa Fe New Mexican).  

Emanuel spoke about the big year Democrats had in 2006 and how we won; it wasn't just the war.

(Cross Posted at NM FBIHOPand Democracy for New Mexico)

Last weekend I attended Netroots Nation with many of you. It was my first time at Netroots Nation, and I really enjoyed meeting with people from my state and across the country.

New Mexico was well-represented at Netroots Nation. I sat with Barb and Mary Ellen, of Democracy for New Mexico, and Matt of New Mexico FBIHOP during Howard Dean's keynote. Elizabeth Winters put together a great panel on Saturday where Martin Heinrich, Pete McCloskey, Denise Fort and I discussed emerging issues in New Mexico and the West. I also ran into friends from Taos.

Every State. Every race. Right here.

This is number 21 in a planned series of 50 entries between now and November, looking at each of the 50 states in terms of every race on that state's ticket--Presidential, Gubernatorial, Senate, House, State legislatures--the whole enchilada! Special attention paid to identifying and promoting the most important contests per state.

Today, we will explore a wonderful, wonderful state with perhaps the best election prospects of them all—NEW MEXICO!!  

(Cross posted on New Mexico FBIHOP)

The House passed a deeply flawed FISA compromise that gave phone companies retroactive immunity and did little to prevent the Bush Administration from spying on Americans. We need to stand with Sens. Dodd and Feingold and make sure this legislation is defeated in the Senate. This is especially important as we near the Independence Day weekend.

America’s founding fathers went to great lengths to create a system of checks and balances and protections against government infringement of individual rights. I encourage the Senate to live up to these ideals and oppose the the FISA legislation.

Hi Everyone,

This is Ben Ray Luján. I'm the Democratic nominee in New Mexico's 3rd Congressional District. Thank you for coming by to ask questions and learn more about me.  

I'm currently a New Mexico Public Regulation Commissioner, representing District 3. My colleagues elected me Chairman of the Public Regulation Commission for three terms. Together, we've fought for the people of New Mexico, standing up to large utility companies, expanding renewable energy production and working on behalf of the people of New Mexico.

Hey all, I'm writing from the Ben Ray Luján for Congress campaign in New Mexico's 3rd Congressional District.

Ben Ray's going to stop by on Wednesday, June 18 at 6:30pm EST (4:30pm MT) to take questions. Please drop by and ask whatever questions you have for the Democratic nominee in New Mexico's 3rd District.

Ben Ray just won a pretty tough primary, and now he's looking ahead to the general election where he will face a self-described "extreme right" Republican who wants to continue the War in Iraq, cut funding for environmental protection and maintain the failed policies of the Bush Administration.

We hope after asking Ben Ray some questions, you can help him defeat his radical, right wing opponent.

New Mexico FBIHOP and the Democracy for New Mexico blog are re-launching the True Blue New Mexico campaign today -- this time with the Democratic candidates for all the federal races.

You can donate at the True Blue New Mexico ActBlue fundraising page, where you'll find the full slate of Democratic candidates New Mexicans can vote for come November.

This year, voters around New Mexico and across the country have voted for change in record numbers, and not just for presidential candidate Barack Obama but for more local races as well. Progressive candidates already shocked incumbents in state Senate and House primaries earlier this month.

The primaries are over in New Mexico.  The presidential primaries are over (and should come to an official official end tomorrow).  Now it's time for us to turn our attention to the general election in November.

New Mexico is in a unique position.  Daryl Paranada of the Huffington Post called New Mexico "the ultimate swing state" and for good reason.  

President Bush lost the state to Al Gore by less than 600 votes in 2000. Four years later, Bush defeated John Kerry by nearly 6,000 votes, making New Mexico one of only two states to switch from blue to red between 2000 and 2004.

But it isn't just the Presidential stuff. We also have an open Senate seat.  Rare enough; there are only five open Senate seats this year, and of those, only three are competitive.

New Mexico's is competitive -- and all three U.S. Reps. from the state decided to leave their seats to take a crack at the Senate seat.

A version of this appears at New Mexico FBIHOP and MyDD.

New Mexico had our primaries on Tuesday.  Everything but the Democratic Presidential primaries were on the ballot.  Three open house seats, an open senate seat and the Republican Presidential race.  

Not to mention every single state House and Senate race.  It was a pretty good day, warm, no wind, and a lot of people heading out to their local school or library to vote.

Oddly enough, for New Mexico, we know the winners of every single race already.  We're used to having our elections then waiting for a couple of days before readying ourselves to announce tot he world just who won.  There were some extremely close races, and some blowouts.

The great news?  Progressives in the house and senate races ousted DINOs in three seats.

While the only numbers that officially matter are who received how many votes in each race, there were some other interesting numbers that came out of the Tuesday election.  Let's do this in a "By the numbers" style.

Results are finalized in the Western states now, of course:

California

CA-04: Conservative Icon Tom McClintock beat Doug Ose by a fairly comfortable margin, 54% to 39%, after a nasty primary (McClintock's races generally are nasty).

The Conservative Icon now faces down Democrat Charlie Brown, who nearly won the district in 2006 against the scandal-ridden John Doolittle. McClintock is an unabashed extremist, and carpetbagged 400 miles to run in this district, and I am certainly glad that he and not Ose is the nominee against Brown.

CA-26: After an embarrassing primary loss in 2006, Russ Warner has redeemed himself with a commanding victory over 2006 candidate Cynthia Matthews. Warner enjoys the backing of the national and state Democratic establishments, and faces powerful Republican David Dreier in the general.

CA-24: Both Jill Martinez and Mary Pallant wound up on the losing end of this primary race, to Marta Ann Jorgensen.

CA-42: Kossack Ron Shepston sadly fell short in his bid for the Democratic nomination, as he finished third with 25%. Ed Chau will be the Democratic nominee against Gary Miller.

New Mexico

NM-Sen: With 99% of results in, it appears Steve Pearce has won a squeaker over Heather Wilson in the Republican primary for US Senate, 51% to 49%.

Democrat Tom Udall ran unopposed, and has a commanding lead over Pearce going into the general.

NM-01: Unsurprisingly, Democrat Martin Heinrich and Republican Darren White are the nominees in New Mexico's First District.

White is one of the Republicans' best recruits this cycle. That usually isn't saying much, but there's a tough race ahead for Heinrich. Best of luck to him.

NM-02: Democrat Harry Teague, backed by Bill Richardson, narrowly won his primary over Bill McCamley. He faces GOP nominee Ed Tinsley in the general, and he has been quoted pretty good odds despite the district's Republican tilt.

NM-03: In this solidly Democratic district, Ben Ray Lujan won the nomination over Don Wiviott, and will almost certainly be the district's next Representative.

Montana

No one was expecting fireworks in Montana's downticket primaries, but it seems that things have gone rather awry.

The Republican nominee against Sen. Max Baucus is a perennial candidate who makes John McCain look like a kid. More on this from Georgia10.

Meanwhile, the Democratic nominee against Rep. Denny Rehberg is...well, a perennial candidate who makes McCain look like a kid. His name is John Driscoll, and he did serve as Montana House Speaker...back in the 1970s.

Somewhere, the ghost of Fred Tuttle is smiling.

South Dakota

As expected, State Rep. Joel Dykstra will be the man who goes down to a crushing defeat at the hands of Senator Tim Johnson.

I have a few things I want to cover in this diary.

• Elections results in yesterday's New Mexico primary
• My experience as a poll worker in that primary
• The Netroots Nation Scholarship program

Perhaps the single most interesting result is that ethically challenged Republican Heather Wilson failed in her attempt to win a nomination to the US Senate.  (That's the "woman scorned" of my title.)  She is well known in the blogosphere for her tearful "nipplegate" outrage:

Watching the NM returns, I thought there was one interesting statistic that wasn't being reported, that could tell us a lot about how the Land of Enchantment will track in November.

Everybody's talking about the multiple close races--but nobody seems to be paying any attention at all to the aggregate vote totals. And that's where the real story is.

While we realize there's a contentious presidential primary going on at the moment, the Tom Udall for Senate campaign [Disclaimer: I work for the Tom Udall for Senate campaign] would like to bring you live coverage of the Democratic primary watching party in New Mexico tonight.  As many of you know, the Senate and House primaries for New Mexico took place today.

Tom Udall is running uncontested for the Democratic nomination for the Senate.  The Republicans running for nomination are Heather Wilson and Steve Pearce.  We'll be doing our best to keep you updated on the results of that race as well as the congressional primaries as they become available.

[6:09 AM] We're here early at the New Mexico Democratic Party's primary election watching party in Albuquerque, where people are slowly beginning to stream in. Tom will be speaking later on, and we'll have live video up as soon as the festivities and speeches begin. Stay tuned for updates from the floor, including primary results that will (possibly) be faster than can be found at the Secretary of State's website.

Here in New Mexico, we have our primaries today.  Three open House races with competitive races, of varying degrees of competitiveness, on both sides of all seats.  A Republican Senate race which is as close as you can get.

So lots of people should be going out to vote.

In New Mexico, we did a similar thing for Super Tuesday's Presidential primaries.  So join us below the fold for some New Mexico goodness.

And if you want to add your NM voting story, go ahead and send it to my e-mail which is listed in my profile.

Update: Oh so true...

Here's my little election story. I'm registered in Virginia now (at least it's still a swing state!), but one of my colleagues had a fun remark after I mentioned the close polling in the GOP Senate race:

"A good ole New Mexico election, we won't know the result for weeks."

From our pal Avelino.

Another week has passed, and there hasn't been a whole lot happen on the add-on superdelegate front.  The four undeclared add-ons remain so (list below the fold).  The biggest news comes from yesterday's Rules Committee result regarding Florida and Michigan.  The five add-ons from those two states will each get half a vote, bringing the total number of add-on superdelegate votes to 78.5 instead of 76, with 29 left to be chosen.  (31 including two Michigan half-votes already pledged to Obama as part of this weekend's Rules Committee deal.  Here's where the add-on superdelegate count stood at the beginning of the week:

     Obama - 25    Clinton - 17    Undeclared - 4

OK, we're leading up to the big primaries in New Mexico (June 3) and things are getting pretty crazy here.  Local car dealers are having their TV ads pushed aside will candidates for Senate, NM-01, NM-02 and NM-03 all blanket the airwaves with ads that go the spectrum from pleasant introductions to outright attacks.

Oh, and there was a lesser-known candidate saying the frontrunner in the race is gay at a candidate forum and touching off a firestorm of controversy.  In the Democratic primary. sigh

Also, we have some campaign visits ahead. I wrote about coming appearances by George W Bush, John McCain and Michella Obama as well a visit by Barack Obama himself.

But we'll go ahead and start with the Senate race and the news from there, under the fold.

n Mississippi, Democrat Travis Childers defeated Republican Greg Davis in a special election for the 1st Congressional District on Tuesday by a substantial margin.  Earlier this month, Democrat Don Cazayoux defeated Republican Louis E. "Woody" Jenkins in Louisiana's 1st Congressional District.  Last month, Democrat Bill Foster prevailed in a special election in Illinois' 14th Congressional District over Republican Jim Oberweis.

These three defeats by the Republicans in special elections are surely troubling to Republicans in New Mexico and, indeed, nationwide.  Why?

First, a primer on The Cook Partisan Voter Index, which was developed by political analyst Charlie Cook in 1997 of the non-partisan Cook Political Report newsletter.

Also at New Mexico FBIHOP