The Ronchetti Memes
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Mark Ronchetti is an Albuquerque weatherman is who also the Republican candidate for governor in New Mexico. He’s a rancid, awful human. Meanwhile, Michelle Lujan Grisham has done a great job as governor and is running for a second term. While Fetterman’s destruction of Oz on social media has gotten most of the attention, social media’s Ronchetti memes have been amazing and deserve attention.
Republican gubernatorial candidate Mark Ronchetti is also on the burner — the subject of dozens of memes across social media seeking to demonstrate he isn’t a true New Mexican.
Among the memes floating around on the internet:
“Mark Ronchetti thinks Al Hurricane is a storm in Florida.”
“Mark Ronchetti calls the cops on the tamale lady.”
“Mark Ronchetti warms up his tortillas in the microwave.”
The memes coincided with a slew of tweets with a “Bad for New Mexico” tagline that trended with “Mark Ronchetti” on Twitter last week in New Mexico. Some of the tweets included a meme — in this case, a picture of Ronchetti with a blank stare — while others were just standalone text.
Among the most popular tweets:
“Mark Ronchetti wants to ban lowriders. Bad for the homies. Bad for New Mexico.”
“Mark Ronchetti doesn’t think La Llorona is real. Bad for ghosts. Bad for New Mexico.”
“Mark Ronchetti calls the Balloon Fiesta the ‘Balloon Festival.’ Bad for balloons. Bad for New Mexico.”
This kind of authenticity politics can resonate, as we are seeing in Pennsylvania.
Jessica Feezell, a political science professor at the University of New Mexico, called the authenticity of the social media posts “priceless.”
“You cannot manufacture this in a campaign,” she said. “This was grassroots politics, really, and the fact that it’s so widely shared and so easily understood is really the power of these memes.”
Were they — to borrow from the tagline — bad for Ronchetti?“I don’t think it helped at all,” Feezell said. “You know, these are local people with strong networks and big family ties that go very deep in New Mexico sharing funny stories that are sort of critical of Mark Ronchetti. I mean, his reputation is a little bit of a carpetbagger, especially when compared to somebody with so many generations [in New Mexico] as the governor, so I think this meme trend really reinforced that perception that he’s not from New Mexico, he’s not a New Mexican and therefore should not be governor.”
Feezell, who teaches political communication and behavior, among other topics, said memes are “one of the most important and impactful ways of online political participation these days.”
There are a number of reasons why Pennsylvania gets more attention than New Mexico–closer to the Beltway, the Senate race versus of a governor race, plus the fact that no one understands New Mexican culture unless you spend a lot of time and among those not understanding are the rich New Yorkers who have taken over Santa Fe to play cowboy or wear hoop skirts. I mean, who knows who Al Hurricane is, for example, unless you’ve really lived in New Mexico? But locally, that’s an important figure to generations of culture.
In the end, these campaigns are going to come down to fundamentals around the makeup of the state, the economy, whether voters want fascism or not, etc. But it remains refreshing to see Democrats actually attack Republicans instead of trying to frame themselves as Republican-lite.