County Republicans hope for resurgence

By Bill Donovan
Staff writer

GALLUP — Remember the McKinley County Republican Party?

That’s the political party that only gets in the news every four years when Donna Goodrich runs for McKinley County sheriff.

The party, which is the process of being revitalized, is holding a meeting at 3 p.m. today at the county courthouse to select the six delegates who will represent the county at the state preprimary convention in Albuquerque on March 15.

County Chairman Mike Lunnon said a number of Republican candidates for Congress, including Steve Pearce, Aubrey Dunn and Dan East, are expected to be at the meeting.

The meeting will be held in the historic courtroom at the old courthouse, he said. Originally, the meeting was to be held in the county commissioner chambers but Lunnon said he has received so many phone calls from people planning to attend that he felt a bigger room was needed.

Any kind of crowd would mark a major improvement for a party that has been declared to be dead several times over the past two decades.

But Lunnon, who has been chairman of the party since October, has managed to fan the flames of Republicanism in the county and has managed to get a lot of the Republicans who have been hiding to come out of the closet and support the party.

“We’ve had to convince people that it’s OK to be a Republican and to be proud to be a Republican,” he said.

Lunnon said he has gone through his own period of turning his back on the party.

He originally was registered as a Republican but became upset at the way things were going for the Republican Party in general and in the county so he changed his registration to independent. Just last year, he switched his registration back and almost single-handedly began resurrecting the party.

One thing he has to overcome is the decision made by many Republicans in the county to register as Democrats so they would have some say in the primary.

“We have to stop that,” Lunnon said.

To increase the membership in the party, Lunnon said Republicans have to change the view a lot of people have about the party.

“There is a misunderstanding that we are the party of the rich,” he said.

People who look at what the party stands for, he said, will realize that it’s a party that believes in individual responsibility. Instead of waiting for the federal government to come in and make the decisions that rules someone’s life, Republicans believe that people should have responsibility over their own lives.

The meeting today is expected to last about an hour.