Blue CD2 New Mexico

The Challenge: New Mexico’s Second Congressional District, located in the southwest corner of the state, is one of the most contested districts in the nation. The seat has flipped Party control in 2018, 2020, and 2022. It also has a diverse population including many swing voters, Spanish speakers, college students, and rural populations. Because of the district’s diversity, a holistic approach was needed to reach out to each of these demographics in a way that would break through to them. With budgetary resources limited, we came up with a creative multi-pronged approach to saturate the electorate.

Our Solution: We ran five different ad campaigns concurrently throughout the last four weeks of the election. Brief descriptions of each campaign are below:

1. The social media campaign was conducted on Youtube, Facebook, and Instagram. It included voter turnout call to action videos and carousel ads that had compared and contrasted incumbent Democrat Gabe Vasquez to Republican challenger and former Congresswoman Yvette Herrell.

2. Using geofencing, we ran location-based ads primarily targeting college campuses and encouraging students to “Be A Voter.”

3. Our GOTV campaign targeted a list of strong Democrats with low voter turnout scores. This campaign was targeted to eight different demographic groups based on race (Hispanic/non-Hispanic), gender, and age. This allowed Blue CD2 to collect data and insight about the electorate for their short- and long-term strategies.

4. Electoral ads that were specific to a State House candidate were created and targeted to their respective districts. That way, we were able to simultaneously reinforce the Democratic candidate’s name recognition and remind voters to vote if they hadn’t already. The target list was updated regularly to remove those who had already voted early, so we could funnel the remaining funds to those who needed to see the ads most.

5. We ran a Project 2025 campaign that was targeted to a list of persuadable individuals. This campaign was different from other similar Project 2025 efforts. Instead of relying on fear or shame-based messaging, it told voters “It’s Okay To Vote Democrat This Year.”

We were able to completely saturate each of these campaigns for a total cost of only $25,000.

The Result: Congressman Vasquez not only maintained control of the seat, but increased his vote margin against Republican Yvette Herrell by two points compared to his 2022 victory. This is especially remarkable considering the fact that Trump also increased his margin in the district compared to his 2020 campaign.