2 weeks Ago By The Santa Fe New Mexican
Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham indicated earlier this week that her political career might not be over when her second and final term as New Mexico's governor ends after 2026. "When you're elected, they tell you — and it's a rule I never follow, but I'm trying to be better at it — the don't say never rule," Lujan Grisham, a former congresswoman, said Wednesday after she was asked if she had any interest in returning to Washington, D.
C., in 2028. She spoke while appearing at Harvard Kennedy School in Cambridge, Mass.
on Wednesday for a discussion on governing a border state and navigating evolving federal immigration policy. "I want to be useful," she continued. The conservative Washington Examiner news magazine interpreted her remarks to mean Lujan Grisham is "eyeing a bid for the Democratic nomination in 2028.
" Michael Coleman, a spokesperson for the governor, set the record straight Friday. "At no point in her remarks at Harvard did Gov. Lujan Grisham say or even suggest she was 'eyeing a presidential bid,' " he said in a statement.
"However, it should be no surprise that she wants to continue to be useful to her state and country when her second term is finished. What shape that will take remains to be seen." Lujan Grisham didn't explicitly say was considering running for president but didn't rule anything out.
"I'm worried about my country, and I'm worried about my planet. If you really are in that position on any of those things, then that's a call to action in whatever way any of us can be useful," she said. "If Washington needs me and there's a role for me to play, I would work to go there," the governor said, adding she would also support other candidates.
Lujan Grisham was on both former president Joe Biden and vice president and 2024 Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris' lists of potential vice presidential nominees, something that came up Wednesday. "It was reported that you were on Joe Biden's short list for 2020 as his VP," journalist and moderator Eugene Smith told the governor during Wednesday's discussion. "Was that a joke? The short list?" Lujan Grisham quipped before repeating her title as "shortest governor in America.
" "So, I've interviewed the governor on Zoom once or twice during the pandemic, and I did not know you were as short as you were until ...
" Smith said. "You just got to own [it]," Lujan Grisham said. "Nothing I can do about it.
" Lujan Grisham said she would like to see more women elected, noting there eight Democratic and four Republican female governors. "I’d like to see 54% to 60% of all elected office filled by women," she said. "Not that I want to create yet a new and more heinous gender bias anywhere.
But if we’re going to really uphold a fragile democracy, and God knows it’s fragile, then you have to represent the people in the right ways, which means 54%-plus are women.".
