New Mexico Forward Party arrives at a difficult moment for its core ideas
The Forward Party, founded nationally in 2021 by former Democratic presidential candidate Andrew Yang amid rising frustration with polarization and partisan gridlock, has launched a New Mexico affiliate led by former state representative and U.S. diplomat Bob Perls. The party, which just gained minority party status in New Mexico, ensuring its candidates appear on the November ballot, brands itself as independent and reform-focused, with the slogan: “Not left. Not right. Forward!”
Perls and other organizers are not newcomers to New Mexico politics. For years, they’ve been deeply involved in the state’s “good government” reform movement — efforts to pay lawmakers a salary, create an independent redistricting commission, expand ballot access, simplify voter registration and open primary elections to more voters. New Mexico In Depth has covered many of those debates over the years, and some of those goals have steadily advanced. The state now has automatic voter registration, and this year marks the first primary election in which independent voters can participate in party primaries.
Perls positions those reforms as central to the Forward Party’s identity. Speaking on a Forward Party Podcast in March, he argued the party is not ideological, or even centrist:
“We’re not a centrist moderate party. Rather, in traditionally liberal gerrymandered districts, probably the Forward candidates will be more liberal. In more conservative districts, especially state House and Senate seats, our Forward candidates are probably going to be more conservative. So we go back to what binds us … a commitment to democracy reform, like open primaries and ranked choice voting and independent redistricting, term limits, free and fair ballot access.”
Perls and the other Forward Party candidates will likely find it difficult to persuade voters the party is entirely nonideological.
In the same conversation, Perls paired democracy reform language with an explicit embrace of capitalism and a rejection of democratic socialism:
“We go back to the rule of law and upholding the Constitution, and a commitment to entrepreneurship and capitalism. We’re not democratic socialists.”
The Forward Party is hardly the first third-party effort to emerge in New Mexico politics, and it likely won’t be the last. But this iteration appears unusually organized.
Perls himself is running for the U.S. Senate, going up in the general election against either incumbent Democrat Ben Ray Luján or his primary challenger, Matt Dodson, plus Republican write-in candidate Larry Marker. Alongside a broader slate of candidates, the party seems poised to run an energetic campaign.
Still, it’s difficult to separate the party’s arrival from the political moment in which it appears. New Mexico’s reform politics, like reform movements elsewhere, have a way of colliding with reality once asymmetrical hardball politics enters the system.
The country is in the middle of an intense redistricting war over control of Congress, set off when President Donald Trump urged Texas Republicans to pursue mid-decade redistricting to reduce Democratic seats and strengthen Republican control in Washington. Trump’s push is aimed at blunting the possibility of Democrats retaking Congress in the midterm elections this fall.
Even without his very low approval scores, Trump has reason to be worried. Midterm swings toward the opposition party are a longstanding feature of the American two-party system — one way voters rebalance political power.
Trump is a norm-breaking president who treats the traditional give-and-take of democratic politics as an obstacle rather than a constraint. We’ll be grappling with the consequences of his presidency for years to come, if not decades, including a Justice Department that has become subservient to him.
After Texas kicked off what has become a national redistricting battle, the movement to create an independent redistricting commission in New Mexico was damaged, I suspect severely.
Since two Democratic lawmakers resigned last September from the task force created to advance the idea, the redistricting war has only gotten worse. Most recently, Republican-led southern states have aggressively moved to draw new political districts favoring their party after the U.S. Supreme Court severely weakened protections for districts drawn to preserve the voting power of racial minority groups.
Voters are paying attention, including in New Mexico. Democrats who once championed independent redistricting have grown cautious, as they watch their party become vulnerable at the national level due to bare-knuckled Republican tactics in states without independent commissions.
So where does the Forward Party fit into this moment?
One possibility is that the appetite simply isn’t there right now for a reform-oriented message centered on process and structural change while voters watch a raw struggle over political power unfold nationally. But it’s also possible the party arrives at precisely the right moment — as a vehicle for keeping those reform ideas alive while the major parties retreat further into trench warfare.
