NMI: Mapping the N.M. vote

Votes cast in the 2008 presidential election in New Mexico were actually down from the 2004 contest in some counties

By Matthew Reichbach 11/10/08 2:36 PM

RIO RANCHO — President-elect Barack Obama won New Mexico easily on Tuesday. Obama received 120,000, or 14.6 percent, more votes than his Republican counterpart, John McCain, in New Mexico. This landed Obama five more electoral votes on his way to a provisional 365-173 victory in the Electoral College. As a result, New Mexico is once again blue in the ubiquitous red-blue election result maps from different news sources.

But New Mexico as a blue state doesn’t tell the whole story.

Not all of New Mexico went equally to Obama or McCain. Some areas were more favorable to the Democratic candidate, some to the Republican. There are 33 counties in New Mexico, and Obama won 18, or 54 percent of them. The counties that went to Obama include the state’s four largest in terms of voter registration — Bernalillo, Doña Ana, Santa Fe and Sandoval. These four counties account for 56.98 percent of the state’s registered voters. And Obama won these counties by an average of 26.32 percent over John McCain. This was an 116,199-vote advantage. Obama ended up winning by 120,197 votes, according to preliminary numbers from the Secretary of State’s office.

As a point of comparison, Obama outperformed John Kerry’s 2004 totals significantly in these four key counties. Kerry won these counties by an average of 12.07 percent. Kerry, in fact, lost Sandoval County by 2.71 percent to George W. Bush. Kerry won these counties by a combined total of 40,413. Kerry lost the state by 5,988 votes.

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