Before U.S. Rep. Gabe Vasquez joined Sen. Martin Heinrich in asking President Joe Biden to give up his run for a second term, Vasquez had distanced himself from Biden. Last August, Vasquez was conspicuously absent from a Biden rally in New Mexico featuring a constellation of Democrats. Vasquez said he needed to spend time with his father, the Albuquerque Journal reported. He might as well have said he needed to wash his hair. It was clear he was already thinking ahead to this year’s race and didn’t want to give Republicans any ammunition, such as a photograph with Biden. We now know that Biden’s popularity has been cooling for the past year over concerns about his age. Biden bowed to party pressure and stepped down on July 21. In this political drama, New Mexico was a canary in the coal mine. Biden won New Mexico by double digits in 2020, but when Democratic governors met with Biden early this month, our governor warned him that he could lose the state, according to the Journal. “What I said in that July 3 meeting (was) New Mexico is a bellwether state,” she said. “We’re very predictive, and our Hispanic voters are very predictive.”

She told the White House before the debate that she was worried – a leaked poll put New Mexico in play – but if he was determined to stay in the race, she would support him.

Of the four Democrats running for Congress, Vasquez has the most at stake. The other two representatives have relatively safe bluish districts, and Heinrich is an incumbent. However, Congressional District 2 is a toss-up, despite a Dem-led redistricting that tilted the district a bit in their favor. So Vasquez, a first-term congressman, and his opponent, Republican Yvette Herrell, are running hard.

During better days in 2022, Biden graced a rally in Albuquerque’s South Valley, newly added to CD2. It might have helped Vasquez defeat Herrell, the incumbent, by less than a percentage point in 2022.

Since the debate, pressure was on Biden to step down and on members of Congress to step up and nudge him out of the race. As Republicans needled Vasquez to speak up, NBC asked Democratic candidates in swing districts, including Vasquez, about turmoil at the top of the ticket, Vasquez was one of several Democrats who said he was focused on his own campaign and that was “to stop MAGA Republicans like Donald Trump and Yvette Herrell who support extreme policies.”

“Regardless of who’s on the top of the ticket, I’m going to continue to bring home results and deliver for the people in New Mexico.”

The Biden campaign blew their man’s chance to talk to the Congressional Hispanic Caucus. During a Zoom call on July 12, the campaign allowed only two members to pose questions, according to the nonpartisan online news source NOTUS. When the president offered to take more questions, Vasquez and another member tried to use the raised-hand feature; organizers lowered the hands.

A week later Heinrich, New Mexico’s senior senator, urged Biden to step aside. Vasquez followed a few hours later, saying Biden should step aside to give Democrats the “best opportunity to win in November.”

Heinrich, reflecting the party’s respect and fondness for the president, called Biden “one of the most accomplished presidents in modern history” and said he led the country through unprecedented challenges.

“However, this moment in our nation’s history calls for a focus that is bigger than any one person,” Heinrich said. “The return of Donald Trump to the White House poses an existential danger to our democracy. We must defeat him in November, and we need a candidate who can do that.”

A Republican strategist previously warned his people that it’s not over ‘til it’s over. Democrats just got a second wind.

By Merilee Dannemann Healthcare companies should never have profit as their primary mission, don’t you think? There’s a genuine conflict between the profit motive and what healthcare is supposed to accomplish: providing a service that heals people’s illnesses or helps them stay healthy. For a healthcare institution to be successful, profit has to be tempered with giving priority to the wellbeing of patients.

America has been struggling with this conflict for decades, because so much of our healthcare is provided by for-profit entities. New Mexico regulators are making a new attempt to intervene, based on Senate Bill 15, enacted this year. In recent years, businesses called private equity companies have entered the healthcare field, and it appears nothing good is resulting from this except for their investors. Private equity firms’ business is simply to make money for their investors, whatever that takes. If it requires cutting costs by firing employees or selling off assets, that’s what they reportedly do. As described in a Los Angeles Times opinion article, “Private equity is a 40-yearold Wall Street creation that thrives on cost-cutting, wealth extraction, short time horizons, and financial engineering. It bought, sold, and liquidated its way through the American retail sector years ago…” Private equity has been implicated in the bankruptcies of well-known and popular companies such as Toys ‘R’ Us, J. Crew and many other former retailers whose names are still familiar. SB15 gives the state Office of the Superintendent of Insurance (OSI) regulatory authority over proposed takeovers of hospitals in New Mexico. The carefully worded press release described the authority as “oversight over certain hospital transactions that result in a change of control.” The bill that passed was a substitute. The original version would have given OSI the same authority over more types of healthcare entities.

At a recent public meeting, Superintendent Alice Kane cited statistics about the negative effects of private equity ownership of healthcare facilities, including factors like cutting back the number of nurses, eliminating services that were not profitable, replacing in-person medical visits with telemedicine, and producing higher costs and worse outcomes for patients. Private equity firms, she said, own 38% of New Mexico rural hospitals. These facilities were vulnerable to takeover because they were starving for cash. A new report from the Private Equity Stakeholder Project says 17 out of 80 healthcare bankruptcies in 2023 were backed by private equity firms, plus 12 bankruptcies by companies with venture capital backing. Another wave of bankruptcies is expected in 2024, the report says. SB15, called the Healthcare Consolidation Oversight Act, starts creating a regulatory structure that will authorize OSI to review and approve or disapprove major management changes such as mergers and acquisitions. It was sponsored by Sen. Katy Duhigg, D-Albuquerque, and Rep. Reena Szczepanski, D-Santa Fe. The new Healthcare Authority is to be involved in these decisions, the bill says. The Healthcare Authority is just now coming into existence, replacing the Human Services Department and adding bureaus moved from several other agencies. The bill has a limited life. It contains its own repeal, effective July 1, 2025, and presumably is intended to lead to more comprehensive follow- up legislation next year. A series of meetings around the state is underway to hear comments and receive recommendations on the next phase of legislation. The meeting schedule is posted on the OSI website under “health-care-consolidation.”

We’ve been hearing about the crisis of small rural hospitals for so long we can’t call it a crisis anymore; it’s just the way things are because we refuse to fix it. Maybe this new law can help slow down the inevitable decline. Merilee Dannemann was a columnist and reporter with the Taos News and spent 15 years in New Mexico government. Her column has won first-place awards from New Mexico Press Women. See her blogs at www.triplespacedagain. com.Contact Merilee Dannemann through www. triplespacedagain.com.

A career of reporting on politics and a love of history has left me illequipped for 2024.

Fully, and completely useless.

Generally, my journalism experience has given family and friends a reason to ask my opinion about what’s likely to happen in an election. It’s not that I know what will happen, but I’m viewed, rightly or wrongly, as having a sense of what could happen.

In 2016, for example, the Brexit vote in the UK in June of that year heralded better chances for Donald Trump’s candidacy than many thought possible, making his win a surprise but not a shocker.

Over the weekend, however, I realized that of it.

Think about what we’ve all just lived through. In the past two weeks, we’ve witnessed an attempted assassination of a presidential candidate, a sitting president has dropped out of the presidential race and the Democratic Party is scrambling to identify a new standard-bearer — with three and a half months to go before Election Day.

This is new territory for me. I wasn’t old enough to watch President Lyndon Johnson announce his decision not to seek re-election in March 1968 or Bobby Kennedy get assassinated a couple of months later.

The year 1968 — which included the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. — must have bewildered most Americans in its strangeness and violence.

I understand.

I can say from experience now it is one thing to read history and a completely different matter to live through it. After the last three weeks, I think I prefer reading.

Back to my newfound humility and getting into the swing of saying “I have no idea,” here are a few questions people might pose and my likely answers.

Is New Mexico still in play in the presidential race as Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham told President Biden said it would be if he stayed in the race?

I have no idea. I’m not privy to the methodology Lujan Grisham used to conclude that New Mexico might be in play after the past four presidential election cycles when New Mexicans voted for the Democrat every time. But it is 2024, so who knows?

Why did Sen. Martin Heinrich become the third Senate Democrat to call on President Biden to get out of the race? Pressure from mega-donors? (One such wealthy donor gave New Mexico’s senior senator who is up for reelection an ultimatum: call for Biden to leave the race or “you are not getting a dime from me,” according to the New York Times.)

Your guess is as good as mine.

Will Vice President Kamala Harris be the Democratic presidential nominee? Looks like, but — you know my new mantra — let’s wait and see.

If she is the Democratic nominee, will she win New Mexico? Likely, but there’s no guarantee.

Nationally, who will turn out in greater numbers — supporters of former President Trump or the Democratic presidential nominee? Don’t know.

Will Americans elect a first woman president or return another white man to the White House? I plead unable to see into the future.

Humility seems the only smart play in a moment like this when history seems silent.

I don’t mean to suggest that the times we’re experiencing are the worst America has ever seen. Historians can point to multiple periods in American history that were as crazy or crazier than ours. The Civil War. The 36-year period that saw three American presidents assassinated (Abraham Lincoln, 1865; James Garfield, 1881; William McKinley, 1901). The Great Depression? The 1960s?

But the last few weeks have been discombobulating.

Here’s one prediction I will make: Historians will write about 2024 and people who are young today will tell their grandchildren about the year that the nation lost its collective mind.

Of course, this assumes the years that follow 2024 won’t be crazier.

Maybe I should rethink making that prediction!

Better to be humble than to pretend like I know.

Since 2005, Trip Jennings has covered politics and state government for the Albuquerque Journal, The New Mexico Independent and the Santa Fe New Mexican. 2012, he co-founded New Mexico In Depth, a nonpartisan, nonprofit media outlet.