Cervantes takes aim at Lujan Grisham in TV spot
First negative advertisement indicates governor’s race heating up amid early voting
State Sen. Joseph Cervantes is going on the attack in the Democratic Party primary race for governor, launching a new television ad targeting the front-runner, U.S. Rep. Michelle Lujan Grisham.
The 30-second spot blasts the congresswoman for a couple of occasions when she voted with Republicans on Capitol Hill, for raising big money from outside New Mexico and for her former business’s contracts to run a state health insurance program.
While Lujan Grisham has led in fundraising and in rounding up the endorsements of major liberal groups, this first negative television ad to come out of the campaigns of the three candidates in the race signals a last-minute push to slow her march toward the election June 5.
Notably, the ad does not mention Cervantes aside from the required identification of his campaign at the very end, when a female narrator says, “Paid for by Joe for New Mexico.”
Unclear is whether the ad will help the state senator from Las Cruces win votes or in a roundabout way send some prospective supporters into the camp of the other Democrat in the gubernatorial primary, Albuquerque businessman Jeff Apodaca.
Regardless, coming after a wave of softer ads about Cervantes, the commercial indicates that a primary race that has long been relatively low-key is heating up amid early voting.
“Congresswoman Lujan Grisham has a clear record of standing with out-of-state special interests,” Cervantes said after news of the ad broke Wednesday.
In a statement, Lujan Grisham’s campaign fired back, describing the ad as “ridiculous and full of falsehoods.”
The ad starts with a narrator asking: “Who’s Michelle Lujan Grisham working for?”
“Not us,” the narrator says. “Since going to D.C., Grisham has made a bundle off government contracts.”
The ad is apparently referring to Delta Consulting, a firm Lujan Grisham founded with state Rep. Deborah Armstrong, D-Albuquerque. Before either were elected to their current offices, the firm landed the contract to manage the New Mexico Medical Insurance Pool, which provides health insurance for New Mexicans who have particular medical needs and few options for coverage elsewhere.
In an email, Lujan Grisham’s deputy campaign manager, Victor Reyes, said: “This business saves people’s lives by helping vulnerable patients get health care after being denied coverage by insurance companies.”
Congressional filings show Lujan Grisham earned between $15,000 and $50,000 from the firm in 2016.
And Armstrong said Lujan Grisham sold her share of the company in 2017, leaving Armstrong as the firm’s sole owner.
Splicing black-and-white images of Lujan Grisham into a fast-moving animated montage, the ad then notes that she raised a total of $2.7 million in her campaigns for Congress. (She ran unsuccessfully for a seat representing Albuquerque in 2008, won that seat in 2012 and won re-election in 2014 and 2016).
And the ad, which depicts President Donald Trump appearing to wave goodbye to a jet flying across a map of the country from Washington to New Mexico, points to two occasions in the House when Lujan Grisham voted with Republicans.
Late last year, she voted on a bill that ends an independent government advisory board tasked with developing proposals to reduce the growth in Medicare spending. The panel was created under the Democrat-backed Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. Lujan Grisham was among 76 Democrats who voted for the Republican-backed bill to end the panel.
The other bill, passed in 2016, lowers the threshold for claiming a tax deduction on medical expenses.
Lujan Grisham was among 25 Democrats to vote for that bill.
The ad comes just a few days after a new round of campaign finance reports showed that Cervantes had loaned his campaign another $500,000, meaning he has now put $2 million of his own money into the race. The reports also showed that he spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on advertising and has about $1.6 million on hand, slightly more than Lujan Grisham’s campaign.
It represents an urgent push, as Cervantes has struggled to gain momentum in the governor’s race.
Though he has served in the state Legislature since 2001 and now chairs the Senate Conservation Committee, the typically mellow lawyer has strained to be heard in a race dominated by the high-energy Lujan Grisham and Apodaca, who has come out with some splashy campaign promises about job creation.
Cervantes only received support from 10 percent of the delegates at the state Democratic Party’s preprimary convention in March, though he and Apodaca maintain the nominating process was slanted against them.
And beyond his own loans, the state senator has lagged in fundraising.
Cervantes’ campaign said the ads will air on television stations in both the Las Cruces market and Albuquerque market, which includes Santa Fe.