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My teachers always said I was problematic. As king of the nerds and classroom joke-crackers, I held some sway with a sizable portion of my junior high school student body.

In eighth grade, I ran for class vice president on a platform of hosting school disco dances. And guess what? We won in a runoff after a dead-tie in initial voting. No hippie grad student had yet dreamed up ranked choice voting on an acid trip.

Upon the announcement of the runoff results, my centrist coalition hoisted me up on their skinny shoulders and carried me down the hallway in jubilation. I shouted out wild promises about having music over the public address system between classes and more liberal hall passes. I was drunk with power.

To raise funds, we started selling cups of Coke and bags of popcorn at basketball and football games for a quarter each. We kept the popcorn so salty we'd sell two or three cups of Coke with every bag. No credit, no exceptions.

We made a killing. We had enough money to hire radio DJs from the Chicago area and put on three or four discos that school year. Everybody who was anybody in the seventh and eighth grades went. We had so much money we thought about buying a new sign for Barker Junior High School, but we ended up blowing it all on a year-end computer-match dance instead.

What a night, though! We lined up boy-girl-boy-girl in the gym and did the Locomotion and Groove Line with our hands on the hips of the person in front of us. We were drunk on disco.

It was 1979-80, we all needed a lift during the stagflation of the Carter administration and the shame of the Iranian hostage crisis.

My classmates say I haven't matured much in a half-century. I took their signings of "Don't ever change" in my yearbooks too literally.

Today, I hope to spark a chorus of centrist voices the likes of which hasn't been heard in New Mexico since drivers were singing along to the Bee Gees on the radio.

The political calculus for the June 2 primaries is uncharted territory. For the first time, independent voters, officially known as 鈥淒ecline to State鈥� on voter registration cards, can vote in either the Democratic or Republican primaries. And no one is sure how the state's first semi-open primaries are going to work out.

Political disenchantment has been evident in New Mexico for the last three decades as the ranks of independent voters have grown more rapidly than registered Democrats or Republicans. The trend of higher percentages of independents has exploded after the implementation in July of a new statewide automatic voter registration system at Motor Vehicle Division field offices.

About 82% of newly registered voters since July have declined to state a party affiliation, an average of nearly 6,400 new independent voters per month.

As of March 31, 371,380 New Mexicans were registered as independents. That's 26.2% of the 1,416,448 total registered voters, an enormous voting bloc hitherto excluded from primary elections.

The difference between the numbers of registered Democrats and Republicans is about 130,000 voters. Independents now nearly triple that differential. To put the vast independent numbers in perspective, Kamala Harris carried New Mexico against Donald Trump in 2024 by only 55,000 votes.

The knock on independent voters is they're independents because they don't vote.

Longtime pollster Brian Sanderoff notes independents have voted at lower rates in recent elections. His point has merit. Only about 21.7% of registered independents voted in last year鈥檚 local election in sa国际传媒官网网页入口, compared to 41.5% of Democrats and 36.8% of Republicans.

Still, that's a big swing vote. And with mail-in balloting making it easier than ever to vote and two contested primaries for governor to draw interest, the 371,000 unleashed independent voters are an X factor to be reckoned with.

It's noteworthy which gubernatorial candidates are wooing independents, and which ones are instead counting on party machinery.

Political insider Deb Haaland is banking on the base and big bucks from out of state, while newcomer Duke Rodriguez is investing his own dollars in independents and seeking the middle ground.

Rodriguez is the most centrist candidate in the Republican primary, while Bernalillo County District Attorney Sam Bregman is the only centrist candidate in the Democratic primary. Haaland and her autopen spokesperson are as much at the margins as President Trump and his social media posts.

Republicans Gregg Hull and Doug Turner are focused on the Republican base.

Independent gubernatorial candidate Ken Miyagishima, who is making no endorsements in the primaries, told us last week after a Journal Town Hall that his plan is to let Democrats and Republicans lance themselves in bloody primaries and claim un upset win in November with about 34% of votes.

Miyagishima, who said he hadn't made up his mind yet who he would vote for in the primaries, or even which primary he'd vote in as a registered independent, could end up being the favorite of independent voters by November if he continues to stay above the fray and find the funding for a blitz campaign.

The swelling ranks of independent voters could swing either primary in June, even both, if independents exercise their 26% voting bloc in earnest. If that happens, it would rattle the cages of both major parties and push candidates closer to the political center for years to come.

And voters could have three centrist gubernatorial candidates in November.

If independents do rise up and relegate New Mexico's extremist candidates to the political fringes where they belong, that would merit another epic disco dance.

Jeff Tucker is a Journal columnist, former Opinion editor and a member of the Journal鈥檚 Editorial Board. He can be reached a jtucker@abqjournal.com.