Martinez has generated buzz as a rising star despite her low national profile. Martinez maps way forward for GOP

LAS VEGAS — New Mexico Gov. Susana Martinez, the GOP’s most prominent Latina, chastised Mitt Romney’s rhetoric Thursday and called on the Republican Party to play ball on immigration reform.

“We have to start electing people who look like their communities all the way from city council to county commissioners to county clerks all the way through the state and up into national politics,” she told POLITICO and Yahoo News at the conclusion of the Republican Governors Association meeting here.


“We need to embrace them not just at election time,” she added. “We visit them, and they don’t appreciate that. And I don’t blame them for not appreciating that. We should not visit them when we need their vote and then walk away. And then four years go by and we go visit them again. We have to make them part of the solution, and the way you do that is by listening to them.”

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She expressed disdain for Romney’s claim this week on a conference call that Obama won reelection because he offered “gifts” to minorities and younger voters.

“That unfortunately is what sets us back as a party — our comments that are not thought through carefully,” she said.

Martinez, born in El Paso and of Mexican descent, has generated buzz as a rising star despite keeping an intentionally low national profile. She has maintained sky-high favorability ratings in a blue state that President Barack Obama carried by 10 points last week. She also calls immigration “a problem that can be tackled.”

She’s been publicly critical of Romney before. In a May interview, she criticized his embrace of “self-deportation.” In September, she criticized the failed GOP nominee’s caught-on-camera assertion that 47 percent of voters are dependent on government, and returned to the topic here — but using harsher terms.

“It’s a ridiculous statement to make,” she said. “You want to earn the vote of every single person you can … It doesn’t matter whether individuals are in need of assistance of the government or individuals who are in college, it doesn’t matter. Why would you ever write off 47 percent?”

In August, Martinez introduced Paul Ryan at the Republican National Convention in Tampa. She did a little bit of surrogate work for the campaign in Nevada and appeared alongside Romney at an October rally outside Denver.

As she did during her last appearance on the campaign trail with Romney, Martinez faulted Obama for not following through on his promise to pass comprehensive immigration reform in his first term.

“I offered early on — I think I was governor about a month when I met President Obama—and said, ‘I would like to visit with you in reference to border security, in reference to immigration. I’d like to be part of the discussion because I lived on the border all my life,’” she recounted just outside the casino at a resort owned by Steve Wynn. “I’ve never received a call.”

Asked why Obama increased his level of support among Hispanics nationwide from 2008, she pointed to the primary.

“You’ve got to get out of the primary as a Republican and then you’re now having to run against a Democrat and what you’ve said before and how that ties in,” she said.

Martinez believes that any solution needs to deal with those who have entered the country illegally but she noted that party leaders must carefully message it.

“You cannot be insensitive, but you also have to be very thoughtful about people who have been in line for many, many years to become a citizen and have done all the right things,” she said. “That doesn’t mean we don’t increase the number of people who want to come here to work or go to school. We want the best and brightest to come to our universities. But don’t put 10 million, 12 million people in front of those who have been working very hard to become a citizens because you also impact those people and I don’t find that to be fair.

“Republicans need to stop making assumptions,” she added, “and they need to start talking to younger people, people of color, and ask them — not talk to them — ask them, ‘What is it that we can do better? How do we earn your vote? How do we earn the ability for you to see that we can be the party that will make your life better and that of your children?’ But we can’t be the ones that come and tell them how things are going to be and how we have all the solutions.”

Martinez pledged to continue pushing the Democratic-controlled legislature — although she made gains in last week’s local elections — to pass a law that would stop those in this country illegally from being able to obtain driver’s licenses.

“There are many solutions if we just started to talk about it in a really sincere way, and we don’t,” she said. “I think at the national level, they’d rather pretend it doesn’t exist and that’s unfortunate.”

A September poll conducted for the Albuquerque Journal pegged Martinez’s job approval rating at 69 percent, with just 17 percent disapproving and 14 percent undecided. She’s considered in solid shape for reelection in 2014.

The governor points to trips she made during her 2010 campaign to Democratic strongholds like Española and Taos.

“I wanted to earn that crossover vote,” she said. “And a lot of statewide Republican candidates in New Mexico don’t go there. They just check it off and say, ‘I’m going to have to win heavy in the more Republican areas and I’ll just never be able to earn that vote.’ I did. I lost four out of 33 counties.”

After chatting with Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer a few minutes before, she said that Arizona’s restrictive immigration law is not the type she would implement in her state.

“And it can be tackled without using the word amnesty,” she said. “People can be in this country legally and contributing, and they can come here to do all kinds of jobs, not just jobs Americans don’t want, all kinds of jobs, get educated, the whole nine yards, but be here legally. And there’s a variety of ways of receiving that kind of status. It doesn’t have to be a leap from ‘you’re here, and all the sudden you’re a citizen.’”

Martinez put the onus on Congress to come up with an immigration solution.

“But I do think we should be part of the discussion,” she said. “I don’t think people in New York or Washington, D.C., or in the Northeast really understand what it’s like to live New Mexico and Colorado and down in Arizona. It’s different.”

She expressed uncertainty about whether there will be meaningful progress on the legislative front after the GOP shellacking.

“Certainly I’m hopeful because I want there to be a successful plan,” she said. “I don’t want to see our presidency to fail, but there has to be courage, and you can’t do one without securing the borders either. You don’t want there to be a … sieve at the border and a sudden wave of more illegal immigrants.”

Mentioned on many lists as a potential running mate for Romney, she insisted here she will not run for president in 2016.

“No,” she said. “I’m focused on fixing the things we can in New Mexico.”