Every election cycle brings debates about candidates, policies, and politics. But at its core, voting is about something much bigger: shaping the future of New Mexico and ensuring your voice is heard on the issues that matter most to you, your family, and your community.

Primary elections are now underway across New Mexico, and this year’s races will help determine decisions about our economy, education system, healthcare, infrastructure, public safety, energy policy, and job creation for years to come. Those choices impact every New Mexican, regardless of political party or where they live.

That’s why participation matters, and you still have time to make it happen.

Too often, people feel like their vote won’t make a difference or that politics has become too divisive to engage in. But when people stay home, others make decisions for them.

New Mexico’s civic participation is alarming. According to the New Mexico Secretary of State, the overall turnout rate of eligible voters in the 2022 primary was only 25.2. Only a quarter of the state’s population weighed in.

Primary elections are often decided by a relatively small number of votes, but we can change that and raise our collective voices. The leaders elected this year will make decisions that affect the cost of living, business growth, energy reliability and access, education and workforce development, and opportunities for future generations.

This election cycle is also historic because, for the first time, “decline to state” voters can participate in New Mexico’s primary elections by selecting either a Democrat or Republican ballot at check-in. That change gives more New Mexicans the opportunity to have a say in races that will shape the direction of our state.

You can still make a plan to vote and register to vote. Please visit www.nmforopportunity.org to learn more.

No matter what industry you work in or what issues matter most to you, voting is one of the most important ways to influence the future. For many New Mexicans, that means supporting policies that strengthen our economy and create opportunities for working families.

For those of us in the oil and gas industry, the stakes are especially high. Oil and natural gas support more than 100,000 jobs across New Mexico and generate billions of dollars each year that help fund public schools, healthcare, roads, and infrastructure. The industry plays a critical role in supporting all communities across the state and keeping New Mexico economically competitive.

Your voice deserves to be part of the future of our state. Voting is how we make priorities known, and we hold leaders accountable.

Early voting is already underway for the primary, and primary day is June 2. Make a plan to vote, check your registration status, and encourage your friends, family, and coworkers to take part, as well. Every voice matters, and every vote does, too. New Mexico’s future will be shaped by the people who show up.

Missi Currier is president of the New Mexico Oil and Gas Association.

Honor is doing the right thing under pressure. It’s not running from a challenge. And most importantly, honor is doing the right thing even when no one is watching. In life and politics, the concept of “honor” has transformed to fit a more modern aesthetic that prizes expediency over reality and prioritizes boastfulness over humility and truth. We find salient features of this subtle shift in the way politicians speak and act to appear more trustworthy or honorable.

Though technology has created what we may call our “modern age,” our reverence for things such as virtue, honor and truth ought to withstand the test of time. There has to remain a steady cadence of that which holds true throughout the ages. For some it is religion that keeps us constant in our faith and in our beliefs. In physics, it is the constant – that which holds true under all circumstances, like the speed of light. To transform the basic ideal of what makes us human just because evolution brings change would dissolve meaning into relativist chaos. We hold ourselves to standards because they have worked to keep our society in order. A society that accepts lying or cheating as normal or even encouraged would crumble.

What happens when we stop trusting in people? We may look to Princeton University to clue us in: In 1876, an editorial in the university’s daily newspaper argued against the use of proctors to monitor exams. According to an article in The Atlantic, the editor argued that proctoring was a means of bad moral education. Treat students as presumptively dishonest and some would become so; treat them as honorable and they will learn to behave honorably. Instead of proctors skulking about during exams, students were expected to do their own work. At the end of the exam, students would write that they have neither received nor given help. In other words they would swear on their honor that they neither cheated nor saw anyone else cheat.

The basic rules of societal engagement require that we act honestly and with honor. To break this rule leaves us lawless and devoid of meaning. It is with great sadness, therefore, that Princeton decided to reinstitute the proctoring of exams after 150 years. Due to the increased use of AI and technological advancements that make cheating and getting caught more and more difficult, faculty, staff and students have concluded that children must once again be monitored and coerced into doing the right thing. We have removed the human belief that man is naturally good, and assumed that man, left to his own devices, will cheat, lie and curse his way out of the cave.

The dean of Princeton argued that to maintain the high level of expectations by students, parents and the employers who hire graduates, the administration must ensure the highest level of integrity. In other words, because they now monitor their students during testing, they somehow become more trustworthy and the authenticity of their degree is solidified.

The policymakers at Princeton fail to recognize that the foundation of trust builds honor. And a culture of distrust breeds paranoia. The policy to proctor exams is not the cure. It is a Band-Aid to the bigger problem of selfishness, avarice and low self-esteem. Blaming technology or the “modern age” for the phenomenon of cheating overlooks the simple fact that our proclivity to do so has not changed our proclivity to cheat to get ahead. It’s as old as time.

Blaming technology or the “modern age” for our not-so-newfound proclivity to cheat ignores the reality that it has existed since dinosaurs roamed the earth. We let the genie out of the bottle and Pandora’s box was opened ages ago. It’s too late to put the cap back on.

This doesn’t mean we lose hope for society – quite the opposite. Stick to your roots and desire for a baseline. That which stays true through all time. Honor, truth and virtue produce the authenticity the universe craves.

Javier Sanchez is the former Mayor of Espanola, an independent businessman, and El Rito Media investor and columnist.

One American view of China–now increasingly popular on the Left and the Right alike, especially among the hate-Trump crowd–is that the communist colossus will be forever ascendant, with continued astonishing levels of food production, ship construction, and industrial output. In this pessimistic view, China will soon replace America as the world’s predominant power. We are, supposedly, like an exhausted British Empire circa 1945, and China is the new version of the postwar American powerhouse.

Yet even Beijing’s miraculous 30-year leap out of poverty into first-world affluence and Westernized power is hardly the same as parity with the US. In truth, Trump held almost all the cards at the current summit and will do so again when Xi Jinping visits the US this autumn. According to nearly every historical measure of power, the US leads China by sizable margins–in wealth, economic output, fuel, food, and military strength.

China has roughly four times the population of the US, but produces only about 60 percent of our total GDP. A crude way of looking at this asymmetry is that one US citizen accounts for 40 percent more goods and services than his four Chinese counterparts. Americans enjoy a per capita GDP (roughly $95,000) over six times higher than China’s (roughly $15,000).

We are the largest oil and gas producer and exporter in history; China must import 11 to 12 million barrels of oil every day. The US is also the greatest food exporter in history; China, for all its miraculous increases in agricultural productivity, still must import 30-40 percent of its food, a number that keeps rising as China becomes more affluent and more diverse in its food consumption.

The US still spends almost three times as much on defense. Its nuclear forces are roughly six times larger, and its 11 carrier strike groups are nearly four times more numerous than China’s three conventionally powered carriers. The US has more than 100 years of experience in carrier warfare; China has less than 15 years.

American universities’ science, technology, engineering, and mathematics departments dominate global rankings. In terms of market capitalization, eight US companies are in the world’s top ten. American companies, along with NASA, have regained prior American primacy in space exploration. In new frontiers such as robotics, drones, artificial intelligence, nuclear fusion, cryptocurrencies, and bioengineering, a once sluggish US has woken up, rebounded, and is reasserting its preeminence.

True, the US fertility rate is down to 1.7. But China’s is 1.0, and its population is rapidly shrinking and aging.

But most importantly, China is an autocracy. It is superficially efficient, but its technology is ultimately derived from the free and wide-open atmosphere of the West and of the US in particular. There are usually around 300,000 Chinese students here in the US–and they are not art history majors, but sent here to master and appropriate US scientific expertise and then return home to clone it.

China has spent over $4 trillion in the last decade on its Belt and Road, mercantile, and imperialist agendas and on its military-industrial complex. Yet recently, its effort to pull Latin America away from the US has been failing miserably. China lost its client, Nicolas Maduro, in Venezuela, and, with his arrest, Venezuela’s discounted oil imports. Its insidious effort to control the Panama Canal was aborted by Trump.

For now, China has also lost its discounted oil from Iran. If, in the months ahead, the Iranian theocracy falls, China will have no presence in the oil-rich Middle East, even as its appetite for oil grows exponentially. In terms of China’s stranglehold on rare-earth minerals, a once sleepy US is planning its own huge new mines in mad dash fashion everywhere from Greenland to California, Utah, and Wyoming.

The latest Chinese air defenses have failed miserably in Iran in 2025-26. But US naval and air power–both weapons and personnel–performed brilliantly against Iran.

Geostrategically, the US enjoys two vast oceans off its coast and, despite tensions, considers Canada and Mexico allies. Both are dependent on the US economy and ultimately the American military for their defense. And North America may be the most natural-resource-rich continent in the world. China, by contrast, shares a border with nuclear-armed arch-rival India and an always unpredictable nuclear Russia–not to mention volatile, nuclear North Korea. Besides these, China, which suppresses 12 million Uyghur Muslims, has five Muslim neighbors. The US and its European NATO partners often bicker, but again, China’s North Korean “ally” is a nuclear global pariah.

Critics claim the Iran war plays into China’s hands, but they rarely convincingly explain how or why Beijing is stronger than before the war started. Its trading partner and oil supplier, Iran, is in shambles and now fires on Chinese tankers seeking oil in the Gulf. Israel and the US allies in the Gulf are ascendant, and in the years to come, they will remember that China was an enabler of their shared archenemy Iran.

If there is peace soon in Ukraine, Russia will likely seek to triangulate with the US against China and vice versa, as in the old days of Henry Kissinger’s great-game balancing act (“China will be no friendlier to Russia than to the US, and Russia no friendlier to China than to the US”).

China is about as popular in the Pacific as was the hated Japanese Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere of World War II. It takes some effort to alienate formerly anti-American nations like Vietnam and the Philippines and drive them into the US sphere of influence. In truth, China has legitimate worries about its neighborhood, since it is surrounded by its own “ring of fire,” nations that are far more potent and dangerous than the motley crew of Hezbollah, Hamas, and the Houthis that Iran once used to encircle Israel. Australia, Japan, the Philippines, South Korea, Taiwan, and Vietnam are all rearming, seeking closer military relations with the US, and forming a loose alliance against what they see as their common existential enemy China.

As far as leverage goes, tomorrow the US could deny visas and green cards to hundreds of thousands of Chinese students and technicians, effectively aborting China’s fifty-year effort to absorb and replicate US technology.

Tomorrow, Trump could announce that he seeks “parity” and “equity” with China in a spirit of “friendship” as he announces that the number of Chinese nationals in the US from now on will match the number of their US counterparts residing in China. China can buy as much US farmland as Americans can buy Chinese farmland. Chinese can buy property as close to US bases as Americans can purchase land near Chinese bases.

Finally, the Ukraine and Iran wars have taught the world that cheap drones can sometimes nullify missile defenses and are nearly as effective as $100 million combat aircraft and $4 million missiles. The US is now rapidly incorporating the data from these two wars and will soon deploy a vast fleet of its own air, surface, and submarine drones.

The idea of a third of a million Chinese troops steaming across the 110-mile Taiwan Strait to land on the beaches of Taiwan, while fighting, in transit, and on arrival, thousands of drones, is not an appealing invasion scenario.

True, America can be sluggish, insular, complacent, and naive.

But historically, its innately resilient free people, singular constitutional government, robust federalism, and free-market economy eventually wake up to the next rising threat–if often just in the nick of time. In the 1930s, a disarmed America, mired in depression, was told that fascist Italy, Nazi Germany, and militarist Japan were the paradigms of the future, armed to the teeth, fielding millions of goose-stepping, scary soldiers, and engaging in massive rearmament.

When war broke out in 1939, the US Army ranked 19th in size worldwide. Was it hopeless? No. By war’s end in August 1945, Nazism, fascism, and Japanese militarism were in ruins, and the US fleet and economy were larger than those of all the war’s belligerents combined.

A communist Russia on the move, we were told, starting in the late 1940s, would destroy the US. And indeed, the Red Army loomed huge, and thousands of Russian nuclear missiles were eventually pointed at the US.

The Soviet Union, we were further warned, was taking over the globe, as an unstoppable communism seemed to spread unchecked through Latin America, Africa, and Asia to our doorstep in Cuba. But after the crackup of the Soviet Empire, Russia’s GDP today is pathetically one-thirteenth the size of the US economy, and it has become a shrinking, aging, and unhealthy society.

Next, Japan, Inc. was also supposed to bury us in the 1980s, as confident, rich Japanese investors bought up the iconic Pebble Beach Golf Course, Rockefeller Center, and Columbia Pictures. We were told Honda and Toyota were light-years ahead of the soon-to-go-bankrupt Ford and GM. Today, Japan remains mired in deflation, and US corporations dwarf their Japanese counterparts.

Then, at the beginning of the millennium, it was the European Union’s turn to be the next supposed wave of the future, with America once more relegated to the past. When the US in 2008 was mired in the Iraq War, short of oil, and faced with soaring gas prices, the dollar fell, and the euro rose to $1.60. Soon, President Barack Obama would lecture Americans that we were no more an exceptional nation than Greece or the United Kingdom. “Lead from behind” became his new declinist mantra, and “apology tours” the way of the future.

Yet now the energy-short Europeans import American natural gas, and in early 2025, the euro fell to about $1 before rising later in the year. Moreover, the Iran war revealed the European Union as militarily weak and energy-short, with vast numbers of unassimilated and often hostile illegal aliens, suicidal green policies, and a shrinking and aging population–and as reliant upon the US economy and military for its continued prosperity and security.

The latest supposed Chinese existential threat is not to be assessed by how fast and impressively the nation rose from its own prior weakness, poverty, and irrelevance. What matters instead is to what degree its innate system ensures that such ascendance will be permanently continued and whether its political system, food and fuel capacity, military, and scientific community are on par with those of America’s.

And so far, in these regards, China, like all the other rivals of the last hundred years, has not come close.

(Victor Davis Hanson is a distinguished fellow of the Center for American Greatness. He is a classicist and historian at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and the author of “The Second World Wars: How the First Global Conflict Was Fought and Won,” from Basic Books. You can reach him by e-mailing authorvdh@gmail.com.)

President Donald Trump has made restoring affordability a national priority, and early signs show that approach is working. In the housing market, mortgage rates are easing, affordability is improving, and buyers are beginning to reenter the market after years of strain.

But in states like New Mexico, affordability gains will only last if we can build enough homes and the infrastructure that supports them.

Efforts to address local housing challenges can be alleviated or hindered by federal policies. Today, New Mexico is short more than 90,000 homes, and nearly half of renters struggle to afford their monthly payments, and homelessness is rising as prices continue to climb.

Local zoning rules, construction costs, and workforce shortages all contribute to this crisis, while lengthy federal permitting reviews and endless litigation delay the infrastructure and energy projects that housing depends on, such as water systems, transmission lines, and power generation. With cities like Los Lunas and Sunland Park growing rapidly, the infrastructure must keep pace.

Reforming outdated federal laws like the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) is not just about pipelines or power plants. It’s about giving states like New Mexico a fair shot at building the infrastructure our growing community and workforce needs.

Permitting laws like the National Environmental Policy Act were created with a clear purpose: to ensure that federal agencies understand environmental impacts before approving major projects. Environmental reviews now stretch for years, documents run hundreds of pages, and approvals are routinely tied up in court long after agencies have done their job. The result is a system that discourages investment and punishes communities that are trying to plan responsibly.

Impact statements average nearly 600 pages. Transmission and clean energy projects take an average of over 4 years to reach a decision. The system is no longer working.

America must build faster, invest more at home, and secure its energy future. Endless reviews and years-long delays run directly counter to those goals.

Just last year, President Trump encouraged federal agencies to make full use of modern technology to accelerate environmental reviews and permit evaluations. He has made clear that major investments in the United States should not be held up by slow bureaucratic processes.

Congress has started to follow that lead. Provisions included in the One Big Beautiful Bill reflect a growing recognition that time matters. Developers can now opt into firm deadlines for environmental reviews. Certain energy projects, including liquefied natural gas facilities and oil and gas development on federal lands, are eligible for expedited review. The direction is clear; Congress and the administration are working to modernize permitting. Federal agencies should follow suit.

The SunZia Wind and Transmission project, one of the largest renewable energy developments in the Western Hemisphere, is Exhibit A. Spanning multiple counties and paired with a major transmission line, the project will deliver power to countless homes, strengthen grid reliability, and support thousands of jobs.

There are currently 30 solar projects in development. Geothermal and wind projects are underway. And in September of last year, Pacific Fusion selected New Mexico as the site of its first research and manufacturing campus, a $1 billion investment aimed at advancing fusion energy. These decisions reflect a state wanting to welcome major projects, support innovation, and put real resources behind economic growth.

Federal permitting should spur that momentum. When states are prepared to move forward, attract investment, and deliver projects that benefit their communities, they look to federal agencies to provide clarity. Federal permitting should be aligned with that mission rather than holding it back.

Patrick Brenner is president of the Southwest Public Policy Institute.