Candidates race to see if endorsements still matter
As some running for elected office boast of familiar faces on their side, it remains to be seen if Santa Fe voters will be swayed
Alan Webber says he is pitching a big tent. And he wants to fill it quickly.
The Santa Fe mayoral candidate last week unveiled a lengthy list of supporters, some with a measure of influence in city politics — including folks who helped the current officeholder, Javier Gonzales, win a three-way race in 2014.
“We’re intentionally going wide and deep and across all parts of the community — because I think that’s the mayor’s job,” Webber said.
Absentee ballots won’t begin to be cast for another three months, and election day is March 6. But Webber’s moves to shore up voters’ endorsements, taken along with other candidates’ efforts to publicize support, reflect a desire to establish credibility early on — a push to win voters’ hearts and minds, perhaps, by heralding the hearts and minds already won.
The personal-endorsement page of the political playbook is well worn. But whether it will make a difference for the undecided voter at the local level is a different
question, one that depends on the credibility of the endorser and what the individual voter makes of him or her.
An informed voter probably won’t need the help of an endorsement, said Tim Krebs, professor and chairman of political science at The University of New Mexico. But in an election where candidates are ideologically similar, or little known, the calculus changes.
“Where [endorsements] are going to matter most are with people who lack information and people who think the endorser is a trusted source,” Krebs said.
And from the candidates’ perspective, there’s little downside — provided the endorser isn’t a Charles Manson.
“It helps to legitimize them,” Krebs said. “As potential donors start to see a candidate picking up a lot of endorsements, all of a sudden it seems like they’ve got some momentum. It may cause people to think, ‘OK, this is a candidate I might want to invest in,’ if you will.”
When the pool of potential campaign money is smaller, establishing the perception of credibility early on can help secure an edge in what is a zero-sum game, Krebs added.
“If they’ve committed to you, either through donations or endorsements,” he said, “they can’t then turn around and support the other.”
Miguel Chavez, a former city councilor and Santa Fe County commissioner, said personal endorsements might have been more of a factor once, when campaigns were less expensive, less inundated with various forms of advertisements across different media, and more about “direct contact and door-to-door.”
Now, voters make their decisions all sorts of different ways, Chavez said. He pointed to his 2016 primary loss in his bid for re-election to the County Commission.
“I was pretty fortunate to have almost every endorsement that you could ask for,” he said. “It didn’t make the difference that I needed.”
He pointed to last year’s presidential election, as well, saying campaigns at all levels and the established routes through which candidates reach voters and win votes have changed so much as to be unrecognizable.
Rep. Michelle Lujan Grisham, an Albuquerque Democrat, has worked to establish herself as the front-runner for her party’s nomination for governor — and in addition to hauling in more money than any other candidate from either party to date, she’s scored a glut of endorsements and effectively sought to clear the field, Krebs said.
Joining a varied group that spans from former Democratic U.S. Sen. Jeff Bingaman to acclaimed Santa Fe author George R.R. Martin, a suite of Northern New Mexico Democratic state representatives lent their names to Lujan Grisham’s cause Friday: Rep. Stephanie Garcia Richard of Los Alamos, Rep. Nick Salazar of Ohkay Ohwingeh, and Reps. Jim Trujillo and Linda Trujillo of Santa Fe.
Lujan Grisham “knows how important it is to invest in our schools and teachers,” said Garcia Richard, an elementary school teacher, in a statement included in a news release from Lujan Grisham’s campaign, which spelled the legislator’s last name incorrectly.
Other gubernatorial candidates have secured and made hay out of their endorsements, too. Retired ABC newsman Sam Donaldson, who lives in New Mexico, endorsed businessman Jeff Apodaca, another Democratic primary candidate.
Whether a collection of familiar names and faces saying they support one candidate or another will sway the undecided Santa Fean in the nonpartisan March municipal election for mayor and four city councilors remains to be seen.
A candidate who doesn’t have experience in or around city government “is going to depend more on endorsements,” Chavez said. “More people are having to do that because they don’t have a track record.”
Nevertheless, the endorsement game is clearly afoot.
Webber, an outsider to city government who might derive some electoral viability from his strong showing in the 2014 Democratic gubernatorial primary here, said his roster of roughly 130 endorsements is “a sign of the burgeoning support for the campaign.”
Among the names on Webber’s “big tent launch team” are retired lawyers Carol Oppenheimer and husband Morty Simon, who co-chaired Mayor Javier Gonzales’ successful 2014 run (and Simon ran Mayor David Coss’ campaign in 2006); Roman “Tiger” Abeyta, the head of the Boys & Girls Clubs of Santa Fe/Del Norte and a former Santa Fe County manager who is running for a City Council seat; Jon Hendry, the head of the New Mexico Federation of Labor; and Mariel Nanasi, who leads the nonprofit New Energy Economy.
Planning Commission Chairman and Meow Wolf Chief Executive Vince Kadlubek and Public Regulation Commissioner Valerie Espinoza also back Webber.
He’s not the only candidate to attract the support of community figures as the race to succeed Gonzales begins to take shape.
Kate Noble, a school board member, recently announced the endorsement of Coss, who will chair her campaign.
Noble said Coss’ endorsement will signal to members of the community who know and like him that she is a “serious and worthwhile” candidate. Coss racked up almost 60 percent of the city’s vote in his last election.
But more important than that, she said, is his familiarity with city voters and how to win.
“If I had to keep [Coss’ endorsement] a secret, I would absolutely still want his knowledge,” she said.
In a fundraising email issued last week, Noble mentioned a few more endorsements and offered a list of supportive actions its recipients could take — from volunteering and hosting fundraisers to issuing a public endorsement themselves.
“Real progress takes a village!” she wrote.
Presumably, the endorsement of most headline-grabbing value would be the current mayor’s. But Gonzales, not seeking a second term, has not said which candidate he’ll support.
Councilor Ron Trujillo’s bid for mayor was endorsed by former state Rep. Luciano “Lucky” Varela before the longtime lawmaker died in September; Varela, a Democrat, served 30 years in the House before retiring in 2016.
“Varela developed the utmost respect and admiration for Trujillo and his unselfish commitment to all people and cultures of Santa Fe, as well as his continued commitment to public service,” Varela’s son, Jeff, wrote in a letter to The New Mexican in July.
Trujillo said endorsements do matter to voters and added that more for his candidacy will “come out when I feel it’s appropriate to do that.”
But Varela’s endorsement alone, Trujillo said, “means the world.”
“Although he’s not here with us, he’s still with me in spirit,” Trujillo said.
Another early endorsement came from County Clerk Geraldine Salazar, who made clear her support for Councilor Peter Ives, a mayoral hopeful, on social media.
“I’m with HIM,” she wrote in a September post on Ives’ Facebook timeline, adding a pair of exclamation points. In another post, she wrote, in all capital letters, that Ives was “uniquely qualified.”
Ives said an endorsement can be valuable in that voters, to some extent, can understand a candidate by examining the people who’ve backed him or her.
But Ives, who endorsed Gonzales in 2014, said he hasn’t yet paid much thought to publicizing backers now that he’s in the hunt for the top spot.
“I’ve been busy getting signatures,” he said.
Councilor and mayoral candidate Joseph Maestas, asked if he had any endorsements he wanted to share, said he didn’t think such statements were “all that important at this stage in the campaign.”
“My campaign is not about any movers and shakers that have come forward to support me,” he said. “It’s about kind of a grass-roots effort, especially for those in Santa Fe who feel that they’ve fallen through the cracks.”