4-21-2025 1:10am

The Forward Party Seeks Members and Status in New Mexico

Chris Edwards Editor

The Forward Party, often shortened to Forward(FWD), is a centrist political party in the United States with a disenfranchised membership pulled from both Democratic and Republican parties. Forward sees itself as being bottom up innovation, and describes its goals as the reduction of partisan polarization and the implementing of electoral reforms. The party is looking to achieve ballot access in all 50 states by 2025 and federal recognition by 2028. It has begun an effort in New Mexico toward legitimacy.

The Forward Party of New Mexico is a political party whose members say they want a return to civility in politics and improvements to U.S. democracy.

The New Mexico party announced this week that it is seeking 3,500 signatures to secure minor party status in New Mexico.

The New Mexico chapter’s launch comes after what members tout as a major success a decade in the making: A new state law allowing unaffiliated voters to cast ballots in primary elections here.

Bob Perls, New Mexico Forward Party chair and a former state representative, championed that effort since 2015. He told a small group gathered at a historic church in Corrales on Tuesday afternoon that a major focus of the Forward Party in New Mexico will be those types of democratic improvements, like taking on unfairness in the redistricting process, campaign finance reform, and empowering more people to vote in races where there are meaningful choices on the ballot.

The party chair Bob Perls, said as reported by Source New Mexico, that the party would target members of both parties who voted to keep New Mexico’s primaries closed and would seek to increase the number of candidates on the ballot across the state.

In the most recent New Mexico legislative elections, more than one-third of candidates had already won their primaries on the day the primary election was held. That meant that 70% of registered Democrats and 78% of registered Republicans had one or zero House candidates to vote for that day, according to a Source New Mexico analysis.

The group hopes that it can tap into what its leaders describe as widespread disenchantment with the two major political parties. As of December 2024, 340,000 New Mexico voters, roughly a quarter of all voters in the state, were not affiliated with any of the state’s three major parties, which are Democrats, Republicans or Libertarians, according to the Secretary of State’s Office.

The party hopes to collect enough signatures to endorse and recruit candidates to run in the 2026 midterm elections.

Andrew Yang, who unsuccessfully ran for president as a Democrat in 2020, founded the Forward Party in 2022. Its leaders now cite a number of “Forwardists,” most recently a Utah state senator who left the Republican Party to join the Forward Party last month.

Christine Todd Whitman, the former New Jersey governor and Environmental Protection Agency secretary during George W. Bush’s presidency, is also a Forward Party leader. She joined Perls on Monday, saying the party is focused heavily on expanding its footprint in local races and statehouses, along with nationally, as part of its strategy to challenge two-party dominance.

The Forward Party does not have much of a platform, apart from a pledge it requires candidates it supports. The pledge requires candidates to affirm their commitments to the rule of law and the Constitution, data-driven policy-making, and creating “a safe space to discuss controversial issues,” Todd Whitman said.

Upon merging with the Renew America Movement and Serve America Movement in July 2022, Forward was described as centrist. It eliminated its party platform and instead announced they would take an approach that seeks common ground among Americans.[

Two pillars of the new party's platform were to "reinvigorate a fair, flourishing economy" and to "give Americans more choices in elections, more confidence in a government that works, and more say in our future".

Joel Searby, the former Renew America's political director and the then managing director of Forward, said that the party does not plan on taking positions on controversial issues, such as guns and abortion; instead they would leave those issues up to candidates and state and local chapters to decide.

Searby also said: "We think that Americans want and need a party that speaks to the needs of their local communities and gives elected officials the flexibility to meet those needs, instead of a rigid, top-down platform that prescribes exactly what you have to believe about any given issue."

Forward takes a specific stance on electoral and democratic reform, and the party continues to support nonpartisan primaries, independent redistricting commissions, ranked-choice voting, STAR voting, and approval voting.

New York Times opinion writer Kara Swisher praised former presidential candidate Andrew Yang's book Forward: Notes on the Future of Our Democracy, which inspired the pre-July 2022 positions of the Forward party. Swisher wrote: "Yang does not just give us a laundry list of intractable problems, but shows how we can find solutions if we think in new ways and summon the courage to do so."