While inflation is finally coming down, many are still hurting in New Mexico, which consistently has one of the highest poverty rates in the nation. U.S. Senator Martin Heinrich and his Republican challenger in this year’s election, Nella Domenici, have differing proposals to provide some relief.
Heinrich, who’s running for a third term, came to the Senate with a background in mechanical engineering.
“You have to do a lot of math, a lot of physics, and all that stuff,” he told KUNM during a one-on-one interview. “But what it really was about is like, ‘here’s a problem, how do you solve it?’ And that is what a U.S. Senator does every day.”
One of those problems? New Mexicans facing high costs and low wages. He said he relates with New Mexicans struggling financially because his own family experienced money woes when he was growing up. So, he said, creating economic opportunities for his constituents has been a priority.
“The jobs that we’ve been able to create in New Mexico as a result of the things that we passed in Washington D.C. — the CHIPS and Science Act, the Inflation Reduction Act, and the appropriations bills that fund our national labs — are something I’m incredibly proud of,” he said.
Those jobs include manufacturing in the technology and green energy economies. Heinrich said the challenge now is preparing New Mexicans for those positions.
“For folks who get through college, but also for folks who want to be in the skilled trades,” he said. “We need electricians, plumbers, pipefitters [and] carpenters like we’ve never needed them in the past right now. And we need to meet that demand.”
On her campaign website, Domenici charged Heinrich and congressional Democrats with “continuing the radical climate change agenda,” by passing the Inflation Reduction Act.
The daughter of longtime New Mexico Senator, the late Pete Domenici, is a millionaire, but describes on her site a more relatable financial history of waiting tables through college and starting her career as a financial executive “at the bottom.”
Domenici did not respond to multiple KUNM requests for an interview. However, she recently participated in a debate on KOAT, where the candidate called the federal spending on the initiatives Heinrich touts “excessive.”
“The Inflation Reduction Act did not reduce inflation. It created and caused and drove inflation up,” she said. “Now, that increase in inflation was further compounded by the fact that we are not doing the best we can to leverage the oil and gas resources we have right here. And that has kept energy prices up.”
While economists agree that the act did not have a major hand, if any, in the recent drop in inflation, PBS reports any impact federal spending had on hiking it in the first place “appears to have now waned.”
On her website, Domenici calls her primary economic proposal “unleashing American energy,” including cutting back on what she calls “never-ending regulations that impose costly compliance.”
“Absolutely, any energy policy for our state needs to have solar energy and wind energy,” she said at the debate. “But to achieve the goals of abundant, reliable and affordable, we actually need more oil and gas, not less.”
Heinrich also supports investments in clean energy production without simply abandoning oil and gas, which is the state’s largest source of revenue.
“The more that we’re leaning in now on the future, the less reactionary we will be as the market changes. And I think there’s going to come a day when the demand for fossil fuels is going to wane, just like we saw it wane with coal,” Heinrich told KUNM. “And if you wait until the last moment — the way that some states in Appalachia waited — they were no longer in control of their own destiny, because they didn’t diversity ahead of time.”
At the same time, he said the government should be responsive to New Mexicans in the oil patch who are being disproportionately harmed by the industry’s pollution.
“We need to do a better job protecting the air quality — doing things like methane capture, which has not been done as a matter of course in the past,” he said. “And I think New Mexico is leading the way, but we have a long way to go.”
Domenici said in the KOAT debate that she would also like to see less pollution in communities surrounding New Mexico’s oil fields.
“We need to make sure the oil and gas companies that are working there are focusing huge amounts of their dollars on trying to make sure emissions are as clean as possible,” she said.
She did not specify how companies would be compelled to do that if regulations were rolled back.
Heinrich is polling 10 points ahead of Domenici, according to an average from Real Clear Polling.
