New Mexico's senior senator plans to hold his seat

Jun. 30—After almost 20 years in public office, including two terms as a senator, two terms in the U.S. House and a four-year term as an Albuquerque city councilor, Martin Heinrich is in his sixth political campaign, trying to keep the Senate seat he currently holds.

"Right now, I believe it's the place that I can be most helpful to the state of New Mexico, and I find enormous meaning in public service," said Heinrich, 52.

The Democratic incumbent faces political newcomer, Republican Nella Domenici, in November's general election.

Heinrich has polled New Mexico for years and said that after seeing the state move in a more progressive direction, he has seen some retrenchment.

"But I don't think she's performing any better than any generic Republican would," Heinrich said of Domenici.

Heinrich chairs the Congressional Joint Economic Committee and has a reputation as an environmentalist, garnered from years of work on projects like SunZia, a transmission line to transfer renewable wind energy generated in New Mexico that should start commercial operations in 2026.

"I think I've built a record of being very effective at investing in the things that New Mexico does well — our bases, our national labs, energy — and I think that I can continue to really deliver very meaningful outcomes for a state that I love," Heinrich said.

The senator has supported over a billion dollars in federal funding for the state's military bases.

His first campaign ad of the year aired earlier this month, with a focus on Heinrich's father and the increased cost of living, perhaps drawing an intentional parallel with Domenici, whose father was one of the longest serving senators in state history. Heinrich's dad, Pete Heinrich, was a lineman, and the ad emphasizes that blue-collar background, saying Heinrich is "fighting to raise wages" and lower the cost of energy, groceries and prescription drugs.

Heinrich often touts his identity as a hunter and gun owner, and the senator wants to continue working on gun safety.

"Many of my best memories with friends and family and my own kids involve firearms," Heinrich said. "But we have entered into an era where the sort of responsibility culture that I grew up in in gun safety, where responsibility was drilled into you at every quarter, has given way to a level of permissiveness around gun safety that really feeds into a lot of our biggest challenges with mass shootings and criminal activity."

Legislation he sponsored and has worked on since the Las Vegas shooting in 2017 that would make bump stocks illegal was brought to the Senate floor for a unanimous consent vote in early June but failed. Bump stocks can be added to semi-automatic weapons to make it easier to rapidly fire and were illegal under a Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms rule until a recent Supreme Court Decision overturned it.

Heinrich has also been trying to garner support and attention for the Go SAFE Act, which would regulate the sale, transfer and manufacture of gas-operated semi-automatic weapons. In January, he held a roundtable in Washington, D.C., to promote the bill with a guest list that included the Doña Ana County Sheriff, a Marine, the mother of a school shooting survivor and actress Melissa Joan Hart.

"It addresses what is so inherently dangerous about assault rifles, and that's not how they look. ... It doesn't matter to me if you have a pistol grip or a folding stock or a firearm looks tactical. What matters is how much damage it can do and how quickly, and limiting that to the reasonable use of traditional firearms, of the kind of firearms that I grew up using, that were shotguns and rifles and pistols, is something that I think we do very effectively in the Go SAFE Act," he said.

Heinrich said the 2022 passage of the bipartisan Safer Communities Act, which expanded background check requirements, added new criminal offenses and funded programs to address gun violence, is one of the things he is most proud of for its impact on gun violence and gun trafficking.

Heinrich and his wife have a home in Albuquerque. He also rents an apartment in D.C. In 2013, Heinrich moved his family to the D.C. suburbs.

"That was a decision based on what was best for my family at the time, and I think it was very important for me to be present as a father when my kids were in elementary school," Heinrich said.

He said the family's primary home was still in New Mexico. His family moved back full-time four years ago.

Based on his most recent Senate personal financial disclosure, Heinrich and his wife have assets worth somewhere between $260,000 and $825,000 and a 30-year mortgage on their Albuquerque home in the range of $250,000 to $500,000.

Heinrich describes himself as ardently pro-choice and has recently focused on legislation that would protect access to in vitro fertilization. Heinrich said that while there are not the votes to do it today, he would support codifying the decision in Roe v. Wade into federal law.

The biggest issue facing New Mexico in the coming years is the need to diversify the economy, he said. He believes the state can take lessons from failed energy transitions, like West Virginia's approach to shifting away from coal.

"We need to manage this transition, because we are an oil and gas state, and we need to realize that that gives us certain advantages in terms of a very skilled workforce and skilled engineering capacity," Heinrich said. "But we also need to realize that the energy industry is changing, and we shouldn't be reacting to that.

"We should be leading so that we diversify our economy before those changes hit us in our tax base. That's the difference between Nella Domenici and I. She would like to cater to the politics of that rather than lead us into the future so that the impact of those changes is not devastating to the state of New Mexico."

When asked if he could effectively legislate under another Trump administration, Heinrich said he does not like to play hypotheticals, pointed out that he did legislate under a Trump administration, and said he thinks Donald Trump's behavior on Jan. 6, 2021, demonstrates that the former president is unfit for office.

"I think that is deeply disqualifying," Heinrich said. "We cannot afford to have a president who does not respect the rule of law and who does not respect the institution of democracy."

Cathy Cook is a news reporter for the Albuquerque Journal. Reach her via email at ccook@abqjournal.com