The Campaign for a Better New Mexico

marjorie says...

Check out The Campaign for a Better New Mexico… a non-partisan electoral engagement project of the SouthWest Organizing Project. It provides a source and an avenue for a different way to be involved in the electoral arena. SWOP has a long history of working to ensure that people turn out to vote, particularly those who are the most disenfranchised. One of the first major projects of SWOP in the 1980s resulted in the voter registration of over 30,000 people in the greater Albuquerque metropolitan area. Since that time, the organization has consistently stayed engaged in this work but in 2002 really began to study more systematically how a progressive base of voters could be built in New Mexico. The fundamental goal of this work is to transcend party politics and engage people where they are on the issues that are most important to them, to educate and empower them to make their voices heard at the ballot box.

In 2004, the national elections shone a bright spotlight on New Mexico. Considered a swing state in the Presidential elections, we were flooded with money and outside organizations doing voter registration. As many of you may remember, you couldn’t walk down the street practically without being asked to register to vote. Of course, ensuring that everyone is registered to vote is a good thing. But there’s a big lesson to learn from that experience. Just look at the election results. Registering and turning out people to vote does little to ensure that progressive issues win at the ballot box. The harsh reality is that the two party system doesn’t provide two clearly distinguished choices for many people. After that election, all those outsiders left the state and what had we built? A lot of registered voters, but all that money left little infrastructure behind. The Campaign for a Better New Mexico seeks to build long-lasting progressive multi-issue infrastructure for non-partisan electoral engagement work.

As many of you know, I’ve been involved in the work of SWOP since I first volunteered in 2001. I believe that the community organizing approach to electoral work is fundamental to building a progressive base in the state. It’s hard work that often does not show the immediate results of candidate campaign work. It requires many long hours of door knocking, phone calling, community and house meetings…in short, the process of building relationships with people who aren’t politicos, media wonks, or activists. You know: Real People. I say this of course with the best of intentions…because I know we all like to think of ourselves as Real People. I certainly do. But at some point, if we want to make real change we must start talking and working with people who think differently, act differently, and who might not agree with us on everything. The community organizing approach provides a way to do this. And organizations like SWOP could not do this work without dedicated volunteers…