Karen Giannini narrowly defeated State Rep. Justine Fox-Young.
ALBUQUERQUE—Nobody thought Karen Giannini was going to win.
Not local political junkies (like us at NMI) watching tight races on election night; not her new Democratic colleagues in the state House of Representatives; and certainly not her incumbent opponent, Rep. Justine Fox-Young, who was sitting in what everyone considered a safe Republican seat.
But somehow this Air Force veteran and divorced mother of three defied all odds and expectations by beating her well-financed incumbent opponent.
And she did it without spending a dime.
“For me it was the surprise of the evening,” says Brian Sanderoff, president of Research and Polling Inc., the Albuquerque firm that does political polling as well as redistricting research for the New Mexico Legislature. According to figures from 2001, Sanderoff says, voters in this Northeast Heights district (House District 30) can be expected to vote about 40 percent Democratic and 60 percent Republican in statewide races.
There were many surprises on election night — a man named Barack Hussein Obama became the country’s first black president and Democrats won all four of the state’s open congressional seats — but in New Mexico perhaps the most unexpected news of the election came out of this Republican-heavy district that spreads north and east from the city’s busiest intersection, San Mateo and Montgomery.
“District 30 would, by any stretch of the imagination, by any Democrat or Republican planners, be considered a safe district [for Republicans] and one that wouldn’t be worthy of targeting for either side,” Sanderoff says.
Truth be told, it wasn’t heavily targeted. Even in this highly charged election cycle, which started with a small wave of progressive Democratic victories during the primary season, House District 30 was not a race that received much attention from state Democrats, progressive special interest groups or political action committees.
Giannini (fourth from right) stands with other 2007 graduates from the Emerge program, which trains Democratic women to run for public office.
“It was not only not on our radar, it was not funded by the Democratic Caucus. [Giannini] didn’t file a campaign finance report, I don’t think she knocked on a door, put out a yard signs, sent out any campaign literature,” said one Democratic legislator who spoke frankly on the condition of anonymity.
Giannini v. Fox-Young
In fact Giannini did file campaign finance reports — but they were almost entirely blank. According to the reports, she raised a grand total of $450, in the form of two small checks from teachers’ unions.
Fox-Young, on the other hand, raised more than $30,000 this year, from a variety of corporations, political action committees, interest groups and individuals, and spent nearly $25,000 of it on a direct mail campaign.
“Usually to unseat an incumbent it takes a very well-run and well-funded campaign,” Sanderoff says. “They work their butts off and spend a lot of money.”
By her own admission, Giannini did neither. She knew exactly what she had to do to win, and she had her strategy all planned out, but right before the election fate threw a wrench in the works. Her father died in September, and Giannini was devastated. She spent the months before the election driving back and forth between Albuquerque and Colorado to be with her mother and extended family, she said.
Although her undergraduate degree is in physics, Giannini has mostly worked as a software systems engineer. She moved to Albuquerque from California six years ago, after spending six and half years in the U.S. Air Force. She describes two of her three children as “twice exceptional,” by which she means they’re gifted but suffer from emotional disabilities and Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD).
She became interested in political office when the Albuquerque Public Schools (APS) disbanded its Citizens Advisory Council, something in which she had been deeply involved. A former central region director for the New Mexico Parent Teacher Association, she had worked with the Legislature on capital outlay requests for APS and serves on the APS Capital Commission. After losing a fight to resurrect the council, she decided to run for the Albuquerque School Board.
She heard about a program called Emerge New Mexico, the local arm of a national organization that trains Democratic women to run for office, and signed up, figuring it would help her win a spot on the school board.
The six-month-long program partners aspiring office-holders with political veterans who delivers a curriculum on campaign strategy, fundraising, public speaking and other topics.
Building the confidence to run
“During the first week of the program we were talking about who was going for what position and someone said, ‘You know, you should just run for the House,’ and I went, ‘Really?’”
Giannini was persuaded that if she wanted to make positive change in the educational system then she’d have a much bigger impact as a lawmaker than as a school board member. She credits Emerge with guiding her through the complex process of running for office.
“They brought some of the best people in to talk to us … about what to do each month for your campaign and, as your final month winds down, what you should be doing up until the day of the election. We had to do a lot of research on the position we wanted, how elections for those positions had gone before and how many votes we were going to need,” Giannini said.
She graduated from the program in November 2007 and collected enough signatures to get her name on the ballot the following summer.
But just as the race was gearing up this fall, Giannini’s father died.
“It was really hard to get back into the campaign,” she says. “I have to be quite honest: I didn’t send out fliers and I didn’t put out yard signs. But my community knew me. I’ve been involved with them for five years and I think that’s why I won,” she explains.
Giannini was endorsed by a teachers union, which sent out e-mails on her behalf, she says. She also maintains a large personal e-mail list and keeps in contact with former members of the Citizens Advisory Council that way.
“We’re incredibly proud of her,” says Anita Torres, executive director of Emerge New Mexico. “We’re proud of all the women who were courageous enough to run this year, whether they won or not, and we hope they’ll all continue to pursue public service.”
‘Just a grassroots activist’
On Wednesday night, Giannini was honored with an Emerging Democratic Woman Leader award at the organization’s annual banquet. (Another successful Emerge graduate, Roxanne Lara, won a seat on the Eddy County Commission and also received an award.)
In a short speech at the banquet, Giannini described herself as “just a grassroots activist working in my community,” and noted that this had been the first campaign she ever worked on. When Lt. Gov. Diane Denish took the podium she gently warned the newly elected representative, saying, “Karen—do not get used to it. Not everybody wins the first time around.”
Giannini admits she was surprised to find herself losing by a narrow margin on election night.
“I just wanted it to be close, and when it had me losing by 22 votes I said, ‘Oh my goodness! Look what could have happened if I’d put out signs!” Giannini says.
“I just didn’t want to lose so badly that it would reflect badly on Emerge, because they did a really good job of showing us how to do it. Having that support system is, for somebody like me, who hasn’t been in the political arena and doesn’t have a lot of money, it’s imperative,” she says.
She was even more shocked to find that by the next day she had taken the lead.
“I was like, ‘Are you kidding?’ All I could think was: ‘Boy, Justine is really going to be upset. If she finds out what I did — or didn’t do — she’s gonna have conniptions,’” she says.
Fox-Young was elected to the State House in 2004 after her own surprise upset of State Rep. Bob White, after a heated primary. At the time, Fox-Young was the office manager for attorney Mickey Barnett’s, an elected Republican National Committeeman from New Mexico. At 25 she became the youngest member of the House and earned a reputation as a moderate Republican; this January she was one of only two House Republicans to vote for a bill approving domestic partnerships.
The ACORN effect?
Last month, Fox-Young stepped confidently into the spotlight when she held a press conference at which she announced that she had “undeniable proof that there was voter fraud in the June election,” and distributed incompletely redacted copies of voter registration cards.
But the potential positive impact of that move was likely muted when voters whose registrations Fox-Young said were fraudulent began to come forward and challenge her allegations. The government watchdog group Common Cause said her claims were “simply inaccurate.” The American Civil Liberties Union sued her for invasion of privacy, conspiracy and negligence. The Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund filed a related suit against GOP attorney Pat Rogers and private investigator Al Romero for their roles in what MALDEF said was voter intimidation.
“Justine Fox-Young brought a lot of negative attention to herself with the whole ACORN bogeyman thing and she became a very partisan candidate,” says Neri Holguin, a Democratic strategist who worked on a number of legislative races, including fellow Democrat Tim Eichenberg’s successful race against incumbent Republican Diane Snyde (in a state Senate district that overlaps House District 30). That, combined with what Holguin describes as a lack of attention to her campaign, left an opening for Giannini.
“She might have made a miscue with the whole Pat Rogers vote fraud issue,” agrees Greg Payne, a Republican former Albuquerque city councilor and former state representative who was elected to the Legislature along with Fox-Young in 2004. “That spent a lot of time in the headlines, and not in a very positive way.”
But other observers say her loss probably had little to do with the vote fraud kerfuffle.
“It doesn’t strike me as enough reason,” Sanderoff says. “I’d be curious to know what percentage of registered voters even knew about it. When you have a turnout of 72 percent, which is a high turnout, you’re dealing with a lot of high-risk voters. I don’t see those people paying attention to press conferences. … They’re not the kind of people who read the editorial pages either.”
Giannini says she plans to meet with Democratic leaders this weekend and is looking forward to serving her constituents in the Legislature, working specifically on education and health care reform.
Although the final results have not yet been certified, it appears that the race, though close, will not trigger an automatic recount. Still, Fox-Young could ask for — and pay for — a recount. Giannini is not worried.
“I have a hunch that she’ll want a recount, so that’s still a process that may occur, but I still think I’ll prevail,” Giannini said.
Fox-Young did not respond to several interview requests from NMI seeking comment for this story.
Read our Comment and Privacy Policy.