President Biden on Thursday rallied with New Mexico Democrats, seeking to boost Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham (D) across the finish line in her bid for reelection.
“That governor of yours, she’s something else, isn’t she. She talks about being the shortest governor — she’s the tallest governor I know,” Biden said at a rally in Albuquerque. “She’s the real deal. She’s really the real deal … No one’s going to fight harder for this state, it’s in her DNA.”
Lujan Grisham first won election to the governor’s mansion in 2018 by roughly 100,000 votes. She was under consideration for a Cabinet post in Biden’s administration, but now finds herself in a tight campaign against Republican Mark Ronchetti as Democrats play defense with less than a week until Election Day.
Biden carried New Mexico by 10 percentage points in 2020, and the state has voted for the Democratic presidential nominee each cycle since 2008.
A poll released earlier this week from the Trafalgar Group showed Lujan Grisham trailing by 1 percentage point to her Republican challenger, Mark Ronchetti. Other polls over the past month from Emerson College and the left-leaning Public Policy Polling have shown Lujan Grisham leading by at least 5 percentage points.
“We need to reelect your governor, to state the obvious,” Biden said Thursday. “We need to elect the ballot, up and down.”
Biden’s speech contained a laundry list of accomplishments his administration and Democrats have gotten done since January 2021, including passage of a bipartisan gun safety bill, a bipartisan infrastructure bill, signing off on student debt relief and adding hundreds of thousands of manufacturing jobs.
Biden warned that Republicans would reverse key gains by seeking to reverse the student loan forgiveness policy and repeal the Inflation Reduction Act, a bill passed earlier this year with only Democratic votes that encourages the use of clean energy and lowers the cost of prescription drugs.
The president also echoed the theme of his speech from Wednesday night, when he sounded the alarm about Republicans on the ballot in states across the country who have said they would refuse to accept the results of this year’s election, just as they did in 2020.
“We’ve made enormous progress in just 20 months, but we have more to do,” Biden said. “Everything is literally at stake in just five days in this country that we love so dearly.”
Biden will head from New Mexico to California on Thursday night. He will hold an event there with Rep. Mike Levin (D) before traveling to the Chicago area on Friday, then on to Pennsylvania on Saturday for an event with Democrats there and former President Obama.