1978 New Mexico gubernatorial election
Election for the governorship of the U.S. state of New Mexico
The 1978 New Mexico gubernatorial election took place on November 7, 1978, in order to elect the Governor of New Mexico. Due to term limits, incumbent Democrat Jerry Apodaca was ineligible to seek a second term as governor. Bruce King, a member of the Democratic Party who had previously served as governor from 1971 to 1975, won the open seat. With a margin of victory of just 1.09%, this was the second closest contest of the 1978 cycle, behind only the election in Texas.
Primary election
Democratic primary
The Democratic primary was won by former Governor Bruce King.
Results
Republican primary
The Republican primary was won by former state senator Joe Skeen.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “1978 New Mexico gubernatorial election” is election for the governorship of the U.S. state of New Mexico. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Mexico, gubernatorial and election, not as a finished interpretation.
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Chronology, provenance and viewpoint should be read together before a broad social or political interpretation is accepted. The source revision retrieved here is dated Nov 25, 2025. The linked authority identifier is Q28221544. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1978, 1971 and 1975.
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This entry incorporates text from “1978 New Mexico gubernatorial election” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.