The polls may show Rep. Tom Udall beating his Republican opponents in New Mexico's 2008 Senate race, but the party is working overtime to make sure that doesn't happen.
About 1,000 Republicans met at the party's Bernalillo County Pre-Primary Convention on Sunday, where they heard campaign speeches by Republican contenders for the November congressional elections.
Republican Party of New Mexico spokesman Scott Darnell said the stakes are high in the 2008 congressional races.
"The fact that we have three open House seats and one open Senate seat means that Republicans are going to be energized and will have a lot of choices to make before now and the primary," he said. "They have excellent candidates in each race."
Reps. Heather Wilson and Steve Pearce are running against each other in the Republican primary for the Senate seat being vacated by Pete Domenici, who will not run for re-election.
Wilson, who spoke at the convention, said she is the Republican with the best chance to make it to the Senate.
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"It is up to the Republican Party to nominate a conservative who can beat Tom Udall in the race for the Senate," she said. "They've thrown all kinds of polls at me, and yet I've shown I can win in a tough district again and again and again."
She said she is stronger on issues of national defense than Pearce and voted to beef up New Mexico's border protection while Pearce voted against it.
Wilson also said she has done more than any other candidate to support the military in New Mexico.
"Tom Udall brought forward a spending bill that would have cut 3,000 jobs from our national laboratories and devastated our ability to secure our nation's nuclear weapons stockpile," she said. "Steve, you voted to cut an extra $1.3 billion and thousands of more jobs from our nuclear deterrent. And to me, that defies common sense."
Pearce said he is more conservative than Wilson and can do a better job than her rallying the party's conservative base.
"I stand proudly as a conservative and say that my core values are my faith, family, my service and freedom," he said. "In our hearts and souls, we must decide the moral basis for this country. I tell you that in that cultural struggle, we're either going to choose rightly or wrongly, and our nation is going to ride on the outcome of that."
Pearce said he polls well among conservative Hispanic voters because he has taken a strong stance against abortion.
He said he has also fought tax increases more aggressively than Wilson and has done a better job cutting waste on spending.
The differences between the two candidates are clear in their voting records, Pearce said.
"I am the only New Mexican in the delegation in Washington to vote against cloning and stem cell research on embryos," he said. "I am the only member of the New Mexico delegation to support the (troop) surge (in Iraq) without exception. I believe that we must be on offense in the war on terror."
Darnell said the convention Sunday chose 156 of the 437 total delegates for the Republican Party's state pre-primary convention, which will be held March 15.
He said the convention will determine the ballot order for New Mexico's Republican primary.
It will also indicate who will be the front runner for the party's nomination for Senate, he said.
"The winner of the state convention will be on top of the ballot," Darnell said. "That also has some media importance, because the winner is the candidate who obviously won the most support from the Republican Party's activists and the party as a whole, which dictates what it means to be a Republican."
