Border wall is out of sync with the Southwest's changing politics

By Trip Gabriel, New York Times News Service

Sunday, Jan. 27, 2019 | 2 a.m.

LAS CRUCES, N.M. — In a vast congressional district of fluted mountain ranges, chile crops and oil and gas wells on the country’s southern border, New Mexico Democrats in November broke the Republican hold on a House seat that had endured for 37 years, except for a two-year break.


Xochitl Torres Small, a 34-year-old water rights lawyer, won by carefully calibrating her message as a problem-solver, like several other moderate Democrats who flipped House seats nationwide last year. Though the region is 55 percent Hispanic, she did not harp on President Donald Trump’s border wall or his incitement of fears of immigrants bringing crime and drugs.

She did not need to.

“In New Mexico, we experience the positions of this president a little more intimately than a lot of people,” said Jeff Steinborn, a Democratic state lawmaker from Las Cruces. “The race baiting, divisive border politics has a very human face in our community.”

As Trump agreed Friday to end the longest government shutdown on record, in the face of some of his lowest approval ratings ever, he backed down at least temporarily from his campaign promise of a border wall. Doing so could come at a political price with his supporters.

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