In a wild turnaround, Xochitl Torres Small, a Democrat, appears to have won the race for New Mexico’s Second Congressional District seat a little less than a day after her opponent announced that she had won instead.
Late Tuesday night, Republican Yvette Herrell held the edge over Torres Small by 1,970 votes and claimed victory. However, Torres Small refused to concede because more than 8,000 absentee ballots from Doña Ana County had not been counted. There, the clerk’s office quit counting overnight and resumed the count in the morning.
According to published reports, Torres Small wound up winning the absentee voting by a landslide, with 6,411 votes to just 1,847 for Herrell. That was more than enough to give Torres Small the win by a margin of 2,724 votes, and late Wednesday she announced her victory to her supporters. However, now it was Herrell who was refusing to concede.
If the results are confirmed, it would mean that all three of New Mexico’s congressional representatives are now Democrats, with Debra Haaland and Ben Lujan also winning. In New Mexico’s Senate race, Democrat Martin Heinrich captured 54 percent of the vote to easily defeat Republican Mick Rich (31 percent) and Libertarian Gary Johnson, the former governor, (15 percent).
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