Secretary of State Dianna Durand is running for reelection in New Mexico, but when the intrepid team at ProgressNow NM attended the Billy the Kid Days festival in Lincoln last weekend they noticed that her campaign office had painted over the party label on her signs. Amazingly, her campaign staff explained that she doesn’t want to be associated with the Republican Party because it would “look bad in print” and in Northern New Mexico it would “be a bad thing for them to know” about Durand:
Now, what could Durand possibly fear about being known as a Republican? Could it be the fact that the GOP label is increasingly identified with extremism, intolerance, and lunatic fringe conspiracy theories? Or maybe it’s the way Republicans oppose any fair-minded approach to reforming America’s immigration system, or their stepped-up efforts to regulate the reproductive systems of women?