Candidate says he wasn’t paid to leave race
Democrat was paid $14K by rival for governorship a day before quitting
The day before announcing his withdrawal from the race, gubernatorial candidate Peter DeBenedittis was paid $14,000 by one of his Democratic rivals, according to campaign finance records.
In an interview Thursday, DeBenedittis said he wasn’t paid to drop out.
Instead, Democratic candidate Jeff Apodaca hired him as a campaign spokesman for $4,000 a month and also paid him $10,000 for an email list — but only after he had decided to leave the race, DeBenedittis said.
“I can’t stress this enough,” he said. “I talked to all the candidates about the issues. Jeff had the issues, so I endorsed him.
“He also realized I had talent. … He offered
me a communications position, and I snatched it.”
It’s rare for one candidate to hire another during a political campaign.
The transaction drew criticism Thursday from another Democratic candidate in the race, state Sen. Joseph Cervantes of Las Cruces.
“It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out that there was a deal cut, and it involved a very substantial payment of money,” Cervantes said.
DeBenedittis said there was nothing improper. He was unemployed at the time, he said, having been focused on the campaign for about a year.
And he had built a valuable list of Democratic contacts and expertise in the issues, he said.
DeBenedittis decided to take a job with the Apodoca campaign — and sell the email list — only after deciding to leave the race, he said.
“To me, I’m trying to leverage the assets in my campaign into assets I can survive off of,” he said.
Apodaca’s campaign finance reports show two payments to “Peter D and Company” of Santa Fe on March 13 — for $4,000 and $10,000. Each is listed as a “consulting fee.”
DeBenedittis announced his withdrawal from the race the next day, March 14, in a goodbye email. In the message, he noted that Apodaca had added “single-payer health care, 100% renewable energy, and a state bank to his campaign of big ideas to create new jobs.”
He sent a formal letter of withdrawal to the Secretary of State’s Office on March 15.
DeBenedittis had hinted a few days earlier that he might leave the race. During the Democratic pre-primary convention on March 10, he urged his supporters to vote for Apodaca.
Before that, DeBenedittis had pitched himself as a political outsider and progressive candidate for the Democratic nomination.
He had also accused party insiders of tilting the primary playing field “in favor of their preferred corporate candidate” — an apparent reference to U.S. Rep. Michelle Lujan Grisham, who won 67 percent of the delegate vote at the pre-primary convention, allowing her name to appear first on the ballot.
His exit left three candidates in the race — Lujan Grisham, also a former Bernalillo County commissioner; Cervantes, a Las Cruces lawyer; and Apodaca, a former media executive in Albuquerque.
The primary election is June 5. U.S. Rep. Steve Pearce of Hobbs is running on the Republican side.
Incumbent Gov. Susana Martinez, a Republican, cannot run this year because of term limits.
DeBenedittis said he’s providing real value to the Apodaca campaign.
“For the amount of work I’m doing vs. any other campaign consultant, I’m getting paid peanuts,” he said Thursday. “I’m working my butt off.”
Apodaca, for his part, said he was looking to hire a communications director last month, and DeBenedittis was a good fit for the job. They had similar campaign platforms, he said.
The hiring came after DeBenedittis had left the race, Apodaca said, following the pre-primary convention when DeBenedittis had already urged his supporters to back Apodaca.
The suggestion that they’d cut a shady deal of some kind — “that’s just not factual,” Apodaca said in an interview.