Doing More and Defying Labels in New Mexico
New York City Mayor Mamdani has received a lot of attention, burnished the progressive label, and attracted all of the time-honored right-wing labels by advancing his ideas for rent stabilization, free childcare, city-owned discount food stores, reducing the cost of public transportation and more. In Maine, where Graham Platner became a lightning rod, his replacement, Troy Jackson, the logger and former Senate President, has been similarly branded. Dr. Abdul El-Sayed’s win today in the Democratic primary for the U.S. Senate in Michigan guarantees that the charged rhetoric will continue in both directions in his race against former Rep. Mike Rogers, while also assuring that we will be talking more about Medicare-for-All. But the one place where leaders have avoided labels and have done more than perhaps any other is New Mexico. New Mexico made childcare free statewide, regardless of income level, and when Congress failed to extend the enhanced ACA tax credits, the state stepped in and used their own funds to replace the lost subsidies. Several other states offset some of the lost funding but only New Mexico replaced it.
That second step has had a demonstrable effect. According to a new analysis we released, New Mexico is the only state where ACA Marketplace enrollment has increased, showing that when it comes to affording health insurance, money matters.
New Mexico made childcare “universal” through a mix of trust fund money and new state general fund resources with some of the funds used to raise provider rates and expand capacity.
You might say New Mexico cheated. It has money other states don’t have from a boom in oil and fracking revenues. But there is a point there as well, one that I know well from my time in state government. States sometimes attach sunset provisions to new spending to get legislation passed, or create rainy day funds when they can, but overall, legislatures and governors are captives of state revenue cycles; they spend when revenues are up and cut when they are down. New Mexico is a small state; its budget is about the same size as my human services department’s budget was decades ago in New Jersey, adjusted for inflation. But spending effort and budget pain are proportional; they are not greater in big states.
New Mexico also has democratic control of the governorship and both houses of the legislature, another thing that has mattered. But nationally, no one has gone out of their way to brand New Mexico’s initiatives as progressive or as “socialism.” New Mexico’s Governor Michelle Lujan Grisham has mostly defied moderate and progressive labels, occasionally taking heat from both sides. In the Southwest, I guess, childcare and affordable insurance are viewed more as pragmatic measures than ideological ones. Whether they would be viewed that way if Democrats had control of everything nationally is another matter, suggesting that sometimes under the right circumstances and in the right places, it’s possible to do things at the state level that cannot be done in DC.
