2021 MAY 22 ISSUE: CORRALES VOTING PRECINCT 57 GETS TO HELP SELECT NEXT REPRESENTATIVE IN CONGRESS

On June 1, some Corrales residents, but not most, will vote their choice for a new member of Congress to represent them. Only Corrales’ Precinct 57 lies within New Mexico’s Congressional District 1 the seat which Democrat Deb Haaland held until she was confirmed as President Joe Biden’s U.S. Secretary of the Interior. The vacancy is to be filled at the special election June 1.

On the ballot are Democrat Melanie Stansbury who currently serves in the N.M. House of Representatives, Republican Mark Moores who currently serves in the N.M. Senate, Independent Aubrey Dunn, Jr. and Libertarian Chris Manning. Early and absentee balloting is already underway.

Haaland resigned from her position representing the First Congressional District on March 16, the day after she was confirmed as Biden’s Interior Secretary. The N.M. Republican Party’s central committee chose Moores to run in the special election while the N.M. Democratic Party chose Stansbury in a run-off with State Senator Antoinette Sedillo  Lopez.

The Libertarian candidate, Manning, does not live in the district he hopes to represent in Congress, but that does not disqualify him. Moores was raised in suburban Washington DC. He moved to New Mexico to attend the University of New Mexico on a football scholarship. At UNM, he earned a bachelor’s degree in political science and later a master’s from the Anderson School of Management. In 2006, he was hired as director of the N.M. Dental Association. Among his roles there was to manage free dental clinics throughout the state.

Stansbury was born in Farmington and raised in Albuquerque. She earned a bachelor’s degree from St. Mary’s College in California and a master’s in development sociology from Cornell University. She is now a doctorate candidate at Cornell in the same discipline with minors in natural resources and Native American studies.

Since 2017 she has been a senior advisor at the Utton Transboundary Resources Center at UNM. Dunn is the son of the late State Senator Aubrey Dunn, one of the state’s most powerful Democrats during the 1970s.

Aubrey Dunn, Jr., born in Alamogordo, won election as State Land Commissioner in 2012, running as a Republican. A rancher and former banker, he switched party affiliation to Libertarian in January 2018. He’s now running as an independent. Manning, who lives in the Farmington area, helps run a small family business. He left college to join the Army National Guard and served in Afghanistan in 2007-08. He later earned an associate’s degree from Arizona State University in secondary education with an emphasis in history.