Women have won 60 seats in the New Mexico Legislature to secure the largest female legislative majority in U.S. history

For the first time in U.S. history, women have secured a legislative majority in a state with more than 100 seats. New Mexico voters sent 60 women to the 112-member state Legislature — a 54% majority — shattering a record and producing a wave of organizing, door-knocking, and hard-won wins across party lines.

At a glance

• Female legislative majority: Women now hold 60 of 112 seats in the New Mexico Legislature, the largest female legislative majority by seat count in U.S. history.
• Bipartisan wins: The new class includes both Democratic and Republican women, among them Nicole Chavez, the first Latina legislator-elect in her Albuquerque district, and Democrat Heather Berghmans, the incoming Senate’s youngest member.
• Women in leadership: New Mexico women already hold the governor’s office, three of five state Supreme Court seats, and several statewide executive positions, making this legislative milestone part of a broader pattern of representation.

How this happened

This didn’t happen overnight. Women have been steadily gaining ground in statehouses across the country for decades. The share of women in all state legislatures combined grew from roughly 11% in 1980 to 33% heading into the November 2024 C.E. election, according to the Center for American Women and Politics at Rutgers University.

New Mexico’s leap was powered in part by infrastructure. Many Democratic women in the Legislature credit the training organization Emerge and its local chapter with preparing them for the personal and logistical demands of running for office — from financial planning to political messaging. “It’s sort of the soup-to-nuts of campaigning,” said Democratic state Rep. Reena Szczepanski of Santa Fe, a former executive director of Emerge New Mexico.

That pipeline has produced compounding results. Szczepanski trained alongside a schoolteacher named Stephanie Garcia Richard in 2008 C.E. — who later became the first female public land commissioner in New Mexico’s history.

The candidates who made it happen

Heather Berghmans, 36, of Albuquerque won 60% of the general election vote while raising an eight-month-old daughter and working at a progressive policy organization. She campaigned on housing affordability and homelessness — and found voters at the door who were ready. “I did hear a lot of people who told me to my face that they were willing to vote for me just because I was a young woman,” she said.

Berghmans defeated an incumbent state senator accused of sexual harassment in the primary, then won the general election against a male opponent. She enters the Senate as its youngest member and says motherhood sharpened her focus. “I really want to work on early childhood care legislation,” she said. “It’s made things more clear.”

On the Republican side, Nicole Chavez won a House seat in a relatively affluent Albuquerque neighborhood — and became the first Latina legislator-elect in her district. Her path to the Legislature stretches back to 2015 C.E., when her eldest son Jaydon, a high school senior and football team captain who had been accepted to the Air Force Academy, was shot and killed. She has been a visible advocate for crime victims at the Legislature ever since.

“I had to wait for my kids to be older and self-sufficient,” said Chavez, who campaigned under the banner of “mother, business leader, fighter.” Her platform included enhanced criminal penalties and financial incentives for businesses that hire people leaving incarceration. She also offered a note of nuance: “I don’t believe in just recruiting women. I think we should have diversity of all values.”

A record, in context

Nevada became the first state to elect a female legislative majority in 2018 C.E. — a cycle driven in part by the #MeToo movement and widespread political engagement following Donald Trump’s election. Nevada has since expanded women’s representation to more than 60% of seats. Arizona briefly held a female majority for a few months in 2024 C.E., and Colorado reached 50% for a period in 2023 C.E.

What makes New Mexico’s milestone different is scale. At 112 seats, the Legislature is large enough that a 54% female majority represents a substantial structural shift — not a statistical flicker. Kelly Dittmar, director of research at the Center for American Women and Politics, noted that states with robust female representation tend to share two traits: women legislators who build their own supportive networks, and formal programs that actively recruit and train candidates.

New Mexico has both. And the results are visible at every level of state government. Women have held the governor’s office for four consecutive terms. Three of five state Supreme Court seats belong to women. The secretary of state, state treasurer, and public land commissioner — who oversees oil and gas lease sales in the nation’s second-largest petroleum-producing state — are all women.

What comes next

The Legislature convened on January 21, 2025 C.E. for a 60-day session. Early childhood care, housing, and criminal justice reform are among the issues new members have named as priorities.

One honest caveat: female state senators still hold a minority of seats — 16 out of 42 in the upper chamber. The 54% majority is driven by the larger House, and full parity across both chambers remains unfinished work. Representation, too, does not automatically translate into policy outcomes — that depends on coalition-building, leadership access, and the grinding work of legislating.

Still, the milestone matters. For every candidate who knocked on a stranger’s door, managed a campaign while raising a child, or waited years for the right moment — this is what sustained effort looks like when it lands. Women’s representation in government has been climbing for decades. New Mexico just marked how far that climb has come.

Read more

For more on this story, see: KRWG / Associated Press

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