New Mexico: Here’s what the largest female legislative majority in US history can accomplish

When the longtime state representative serving her district in north-central New Mexico retired in early 2020, science educator Anita Gonzales wondered who would replace him. Then she asked herself, “Why not me?” 

Although she’d occasionally visited the state Capitol in Santa Fe to lobby for issues that mattered to STEM students and teachers, Gonzales didn’t feel as though she had the background for politics, especially as the working mother of a then-8-year-old son. But the Democratic caucus in the legislature was changing—recruiting more women and people from the working class. “I could see a possibility of me serving,” Gonzales recalls, “because there were people who looked like me.” 

That first race was a heartbreaker. Gonzales didn’t know the logistics of running a campaign—how to find a campaign manager or increase her name recognition—and lost her primary to a local rancher by a mere 62 votes.

But she didn’t give up. This past November, in her third race to represent her hometown district of Las Vegas, New Mexico, she won a two-year House of Representatives term. “Seeing my name on a ballot with Kamala Harris—it was definitely a moment for me,” Gonzales says. “It was a very overwhelming feeling to be part of a movement historically.”

In a mostly bleak election for American women and their rights, New Mexico was an unexpected bright spot. Even as Harris lost her historic bid for the White House, voters in the state elected 60 women to fill the legislature’s 112 seats, giving New Mexico the largest female legislative majority in US history. With the addition of 11 seats, women now make up nearly two-thirds of the state House of Representatives and just over a third of the Senate. Three out of four Democrats elected to the House on November 5 were women.

The strong showing was more than just a balm for Democrats’ shattered spirits; it could have very real consequences for reproductive rights far beyond the state’s borders. In recent years, New Mexico has become a progressive stronghold, particularly for abortion and gender-affirming health care in the Southwest since the US Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade. That role as a reproductive haven is likely to be even more important as Donald Trump assumes the presidency for a second time. 

Female legislators already have made enormous gains by putting progressive ideas into policy in the state. Since 2018, when New Mexico first elected a female majority to the House, legislators have implemented near-universal free child care, paid sick leave, free school meals, and medical aid in dying. They also codified the Affordable Care Act’s protections for people with pre-existing conditions into state law so those protections will stand if the act is gutted at the federal level—as Trump allies have vowed to do—offered a child tax credit, raised teacher salaries 20 percent, and repealed the state’s pre-Roe abortion ban. 

In the legislative session that begins Tuesday, lawmakers are expected to take up paid family medical leave, increased funding for early childhood education, and Medicaid reimbursements for birth centers and behavioral health care—as well as deflecting whatever attacks the new Trump administration throws at them. “There’s a chance for me to help protect my girls from legislators and from laws that want to control their bodies,” says Sarah Silva, a longtime community organizer and first-time candidate who was elected to represent the Las Cruces area in the House. “There’s an opportunity for me to protect immigrant families here on the border. There’s an opportunity for me to make sure that families have every opportunity to get their needs met.” 

More than that, the decadelong effort to transform New Mexico’s legislature—and the impact that transformation has had on the state’s political priorities— holds important lessons for national Democrats demoralized by the 2024 results. “What you pay attention to grows,” Silva says, “and the [New Mexico] Democratic Party paid attention to investing in and developing women, and women of color, to lead. And now, here are the fruits of that.” 

The remaking of the New Mexico Legislature began with a sobering defeat. Almost exactly 10 years before voters rejected Harris—on November 4, 2014—the Democratic Party lost control of New Mexico’s House for the first time in 60 years. In an election that saw Republicans take control of a record two-thirds of state legislative bodies nationwide, New Mexico’s GOP picked up five seats to secure a 37–33 majority in the House. (The state Senate, where no members were up for reelection, remained under Democratic control). Republican Susana Martinez was also reelected as governor after one of the most negative ad campaigns of the election cycle.

In the aftermath of that debacle, Democrats elected a new leader to represent the party in the House, Rep. Brian Egolf of Santa Fe, a father of two daughters who had successfully sponsored legislation to prohibit sex-based wage discrimination. In the days after the election, he started looking for a chief of staff. “I asked all of the people that I trusted most in politics,” he recalls, and one name kept coming up: Reena Szczepanski, the executive director of a training program for Democratic women interested in running for office, Emerge New Mexico. “She was my first hire,” he says.

A former drug policy advocate with two small children of her own, Szczepanski—like her new boss—believed that the key to Democrats retaking the House was to recruit candidates who reflected the experiences of the people they represented—and understood their real-world struggles. “You didn’t see a lot of working parents” in the legislature, Szczepanski recalls. “You didn’t see a lot of folks that worked regular 9-to-5 jobs.” In the preceding years, the proportion of women serving in the House had hovered around a third; in the Senate, it was even lower. The best way to rebuild Democrats’ majority, she and Egolf figured, was to “do it with women and people of color at the forefront.”

Not long after assuming his new role, Egolf invited leaders from New Mexico’s progressive nonprofits and labor unions, as well as campaign managers and consultants, to his office. “I asked them to, for the first time in the history of our state, cooperate on candidate recruitment,” he recalls. That meant unions supporting a nonprofit’s candidate in one district and nonprofits lending their support to the unions in another.

Then, he and Szczepanski embarked on “a really intentional effort to find candidates in all [the state’s] competitive districts,” Szczepanski says. “And one of the reasons that that was a successful effort was because of Emerge.”

Emerge New Mexico is part of a national training program for Democratic female candidates that got its start in San Francisco in the early 2000s and Harris’ first run for office. Running for district attorney against a male incumbent backed by the city’s powerful Democratic machine, Harris relied on a network of accomplished and well-connected friends who were passionate, and practical, about helping women get elected. After she won, those same supporters took the lessons of her campaign and designed an intensive program aimed at giving women—particularly women of color—the nitty-gritty political skills, resources, and networks to run successful campaigns.

Emerge soon expanded into Arizona, then Nevada and New Mexico, and eventually into 27 states. Interest exploded in 2016 after Hillary Clinton’s run for president—and perhaps even more so after her defeat. “We had women who woke up the next day and said, Okay, if not Hillary, then who? It has to be me, I have to be the one stepping up,” says Emerge’s current president, A’shanti F. Gholar. “And we got inundated with women who were wanting to make change.” 

Today, Emerge is credited with helping to create female legislative majorities in Arizona and Nevada as well as New Mexico and to narrow the gender gap in Maine, Oregon, and California. In November, the organization had a 68 percent nationwide win rate among its “New American Majority” candidates: women who are racially diverse, young, unmarried, and/or queer. “These are people who look like America,” Gholar says, “and keeping that in mind when they’re doing their work is why they’re so successful, because women’s issues are communities’ issues.” 

Szczepanski went through the Emerge New Mexico program in 2008 and became its executive director a couple of years later. When she began searching for candidates in competitive districts, she drew in part from her list of Emerge alumnae: a retired teacher, a single mom and Air Force veteran, a physical therapist raising a child with autism, a community organizer and daughter of immigrants, young people, parents, and grandparents.

Those recruiting efforts quickly paid off. In 2016, two years after losing control to the GOP, Democrats retook the New Mexico House by a 38–32 majority, with female candidates accounting for six new seats (including five who had been trained by Emerge). In 2018, a majority of Democrats elected to the state’s House were women; two years later, women won an outright majority in the chamber. Most of them went through the Emerge program; in this year’s legislative session, three-fourths of the Democratic women serving in New Mexico’s House—a quarter of all lawmakers—are Emerge graduates. These include newcomer Gonzales and Szczepanski herself, who won Egolf’s seat when he retired in 2022 and was recently chosen to serve as House majority leader.

The state Senate, too, has seen more women elected each year—in 2024, twice as many as in 2014—though change in that chamber has been slower. Emerge has contributed to impressive gains for women in statewide and federal offices as well, including ex-US Rep. Deb Haaland, the first Native American to serve as a Cabinet secretary, and state Supreme Court Chief Justice C. Shannon Bacon.

The number of women elected by New Mexico Republicans, however, has remained stagnant—though for the first time, a woman, Rep. Gail Armstrong, will serve as the party’s House leader. That disparity compared with Democratic women reflects national trends, says Kelly Dittmar, director of research at Rutgers University’s Center for American Women and Politics. She notes that while female candidates are approaching parity with men in the Democratic Party nationwide, they make up a far smaller proportion of GOP candidates—in part because of an aversion to targeted training programs like Emerge. “Republicans just don’t have the same infrastructure built to both recruit and then support women specifically,” Dittmar says.

In New Mexico, female lawmakers quickly proved that they were more than performative symbols of diversity. As their numbers grew, “you started to see the legislative process change dramatically,” Egolf says, as well as shifts in the broader legislative culture, with lawmakers cracking down on issues like sexual harassment. Democrats began chalking up victories on issues that had long defied progress—for example, moving the state from 49th in the nation in child poverty in 2018 to 17th by 2024. And when it became clear that Roe v. Wade would be overturned, lawmakers took decisive action, repealing the state’s pre-Roe abortion ban and then passing a shield law to protect physicians from investigations by other states. Another sweeping statute—co-sponsored by Szczepanski during her first term in the House—prevents New Mexico cities and counties from enacting abortion bans.

Protecting reproductive and gender rights is an even more urgent priority as Republicans take over the White House and Congress. But the GOP’s inroads among Hispanics, especially men, in the November election has put Democrats on alert: They also need to prioritize broader issues affecting working-class voters. In the historically Hispanic land-grant communities of northern New Mexico, House Speaker Javier Martínez says, the margins of victory for Democrats were the narrowest he’s ever seen. “We have to keep our commitment and our focus on ensuring that we are delivering for people in ways that are meaningful,” Martínez says.

Democrats note one major barrier still discouraging women and other diverse candidates from serving in the statehouse: New Mexico remains the only unsalaried legislature in the nation. Lawmakers are reimbursed only for their mileage and expenses during the legislative session (though this year, for the first time, they will have paid district aides).

When she decided to run for office, Anita Gonzales had to come to terms with the fact that she might not ever be paid for the work—a difficult reality to face as a working mother. “If I don’t get to possibly benefit from future changes [around salary], hopefully, someone else will,” she says. In the meantime, “I think it’s important to have a legislature that reflects our state, and that includes the working class.”

Among the issues Gonzales is eager to tackle on behalf of women and working-class families more broadly: expanding the health care workforce in her rural corner of the state, improving public infrastructure, and increasing access to firefighters in a region that suffered the largest wildfire in state history.

“I really thought this was the time we would have our first female president,” Gonzales says. But even with Harris’ loss, she adds, she feels inspired by the fights—and, she hopes, victories—ahead. “I’m excited at the opportunity to bring meaningful change.”