McKinley County primary sets stage for November races

McKinley County voters locked in the names that will shape November, with the governor’s race still the biggest open contest after the June 2 primary. All 71 county precincts were fully reported, and the results showed strong local support for the Democratic favorites, plus a Republican field that will carry into the general election.

Turnout across New Mexico reached 24.62%, with 346,647 ballots cast out of 1,408,181 eligible voters. In McKinley County, Deb Haaland defeated Sam Bregman in the Democratic governor primary, 6,205 to 2,047, while Republicans split their support among Doug Turner, Greggory Hull and Duke Rodriguez. Turner led the county with 760 votes, Hull followed with 539 and Rodriguez finished with 500, a reminder that McKinley County did not move in lockstep with the state even as it helped define the fall ballot.

The county’s federal races were far less unsettled. Ben Ray Luján took 7,103 McKinley County votes in the Democratic U.S. Senate primary, far ahead of Matt Dodson’s 1,088. In U.S. House District 2, Gabriel Vasquez ran unopposed on the Democratic side and received 715 county votes, while Gregory G. Cunningham beat Jose Orozco 88 to 20 in the Republican contest. In U.S. House District 3, Teresa Leger Fernández also ran unopposed in McKinley County and finished with 6,283 votes, and Martin Zamora won the Republican nomination with 1,330 county votes.

Those totals show a county that leaned hard into the races with the most immediate impact on state power and federal representation. Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham is term-limited and cannot run again, so the governor’s race will decide who takes charge of New Mexico’s next four years. The Republican side will also come back to McKinley County voters in November after a primary that showed very different local preferences from the statewide outcome.

That matters in a county that stretches across 5,451.1 square miles and ranks as the seventh-largest in New Mexico by total area. The U.S. Census Bureau estimates 68,119 residents lived here as of July 1, 2025, and 80.6% identify as American Indian and Alaska Native alone. With a median household income of $45,307, a 13.3% rate of adults with a bachelor’s degree or higher and 15.0% of residents under 65 uninsured, McKinley County often brings a different set of priorities to state politics than many parts of New Mexico. The June primary made that clear, and November will show how those priorities shape the final races.