Cervantes touts experience
Las Cruces state senator running in Democratic primary urges voters to consider what’s at stake in race
It was Joseph Cervantes versus everyone. As the state senator from Las Cruces sat on a stage in his hometown earlier this month for a forum with the two other Democrats running for governor, he seemed both literally and metaphorically stuck between them.
Businessman and self-styled political outsider Jeff Apodaca has gone after the front-runner, U.S. Rep. Michelle Lujan Grisham, who has in turn sought to position herself as the party’s presumptive nominee.
Cervantes has struggled to be heard and even to stay relevant.
By the end of the rapid-fire, hourlong forum, however, Cervantes had wielded his grasp of policy as a sort of cudgel against the less-experienced Apodaca. And Cervantes offered his years as a legislator from a Mesilla Valley farming family to contrast himself with Lujan Grisham, a congresswoman from Albuquerque. It seemed to work. Cervantes, 57, came off as the knowledgeable, if not electric, candidate he could be.
But talk to Cervantes for an
‘He doesn’t just toe the party line’
hour, and there is no escaping a sense of resentment that despite his education, pedigree and years in the Legislature, his campaign is just not catching on — at least, not in the manner he thinks it should.
He has argued party leaders slanted the race against him, suggested the media is not asking tough enough questions of the candidates and lamented that many may not appreciate how important this whole race really is.
At times, Cervantes goes from being a politician making a stump speech to a trial lawyer pleading to a jury.
He knows the issues. He has the experience.
“It’s been 44 years since we elected a governor who comes from the Legislature. That’s several administrations that have never passed a budget, chaired a committee,” Cervantes said in a recent interview.
Cervantes’ argument comes down to this: He has passed laws; understands the players; gets how the Capitol really works.
So far, that has not been enough.
Cervantes grew up in a prominent Doña Ana County family. His mother, Emma Jean Cervantes, was a pillar of the community from involvement with the local hospital to the New Mexico Farm and Ranch Heritage Museum. And his brother, Dino Cervantes, has been described as active from the top to the bottom of the state’s chile industry.
But candidate Cervantes is a lawyer by profession and came to that by way of modern California architecture. He received a bachelor’s degree in architecture from The University of New Mexico in 1983 and a master’s degree a couple of years later from California Polytechnic State University-San Luis Obispo. Cervantes went to work at the firm of Dale Naegle in tony La Jolla, right on the Pacific Coast north of San Diego.
After a few years, though, he returned to his home state, initially working on designing school buildings before earning a law degree from UNM. He went to work at the Albuquerque-based firm Modrall Sperling Roehl Harris & Sisk and then founded his own firm in the early 1990s.
Cervantes had also been dipping his toes into politics.
A Doña Ana County commissioner in the late 1990s, he was appointed in 2001 to a seat in the state House of Representatives. In 2005, then-Speaker Ben Luján named him chairman of the influential Judiciary Committee.
Cervantes made accountability a central issue, helping lead the charge to open up the deliberations of legislative conference committees — those previously closed-door meetings between members of the House and Senate to hash out changes to contentious bills. And he sponsored the Fraud Against Taxpayers Act in 2007 as well as the Whistleblower Protection Act in 2010 — both measures that promised to expose state and local government to greater scrutiny.
But Cervantes also established himself as a conservative Democrat on many issues. He voted against abolishing the death penalty, for example, and would later oppose some bills legalizing the recreational use of marijuana.
JOSEPH CERVANTES
Age: 57 Profession: Lawyer Experience: Appointed to the state House in 2001 and elected in 2002; elected to the state Senate in 2012; chairman of the Senate Conservation Committee
Education: Bachelor’s and law degrees from The University of New Mexico, degree in architecture from California Polytechnic State University-San Luis Obispo
Family: Married with three daughters
Criminal record: None
In 2008, he announced a run for the Democratic nomination in the 2nd Congressional District but soon dropped out of the race in a year the party would end up winning the Southern New Mexico seat, though only for one two-year term.
Instead, Cervantes stayed in the state Legislature. And in 2011, he made a play for speaker of the House.
Fitting with his moderate if not conservative record, it was an insurrection hatched by Southern New Mexico Democrats and some Republicans who viewed Cervantes as an agreeable alternative to Luján, who was nearing the end of his career. But in the end, the theninfluential tea party reined in Republican House members and the votes disappeared. Cervantes was not even nominated and voted for Luján.
He won a seat in the state Senate in 2012, representing a district that stretches from Las Cruces to Sunland Park, and came off as a Democrat who could work with the new Martinez administration. For example, he had twice sided with the governor in a vote to scrap the state law enabling undocumented immigrants living in New Mexico to obtain a state driver’s license.
A cynical view of all this would be that Cervantes has tread carefully, keeping in mind how each vote could play in the races he might run someday. After all, conventional wisdom had been that only a conservative Democrat could win the 2nd Congressional District. And now that Martinez is unpopular, he can be as critical of her as he wants.
For a counterpoint, though, look no further than colleagues who are supporting him.
A couple of the most liberal Democrats in the Senate have endorsed Cervantes.
“He doesn’t just toe the party line. He has his own views and they’re a mix of being progressive and conservative. He’s both, depending on the issues,” said Sen. Mimi Stewart, D-Albuquerque. “… I think he defies pigeonholing, and I like that.”
More important, she says, is that Cervantes knows how the Legislature works and can get agreement on big issues.
For much of the last eight years, Martinez has virtually been at war with the state Senate. Sandbags and foxholes would not have been out of place at the Capitol by the time the 2017 special session broke out.
“We spin our wheels when we have a governor who does not work with the Legislature,” Stewart said.
So with that potentially broad appeal, why hasn’t Cervantes caught on thus far as a gubernatorial candidate?
After all, he only got the backing of about 10 percent of delegates at the Democratic Party’s nominating convention, and much of his funding comes from his own family. He has poured $1 million of his own money into the campaign.
Cervantes has embraced a platform that Democrats could generally rally around. He supports a $15-an-hour minimum wage by 2020, decriminalizing marijuana and bringing an end to PARCC standardized tests in public schools.
The senator says he is prochoice and backs automatic voter registration and rankedchoice voting.
And he dismisses the current governor’s anti-tax stance, arguing that her refusal to raise certain taxes at the state level has left local governments to raise taxes more broadly at the county or municipal level.
That is to say, Cervantes concedes the state may have to raise certain taxes in the future.
The next governor will not get to set his or her own agenda in many ways, however.
He or she will have to reckon with the outcome of a lawsuit that could lead to a court order requiring New Mexico to provide more funding for public education. Meanwhile, about $500 million in taxes are under protest, meaning the state may not have as much money as it thought. And Texas is suing the state in a dispute over water rights.
These are what Cervantes calls “big financial bombs.”
All the more reason, he argues, for a governor who understands the legislative process — and litigation. Like the litigator he is, Cervantes says “a good governor is going to resolve the Texas lawsuit without paying money.”
He still takes a cautious tone on some issues, such as marijuana. While he suggests legalizing recreational use is an inevitability, he also argues the state must ensure it is prepared to handle impaired driving cases, given New Mexico’s historical problem with drunken driving.
So, maybe there is another reason his campaign has not caught fire.
This just may not be his year or his era.
The senator flew a trial balloon or two about running against Martinez in 2014. And maybe that would have been a better matchup.
But now, Democrats are bucking to win back the governor’s office and advance the liberal priorities that have been sidelined for eight years by the veto pen Martinez has wielded with abandon.
With President Donald Trump in power, many seem less interested in a moderate. Even the presumptive Republican nominee for governor, U.S. Rep. Steve Pearce, appears to be running to the center, talking about jobs and poverty rather than red meat issues such as abortion or immigration.
Cervantes, meanwhile, can almost seem like a politician out of another time, when experience and connections were enough to get you a party’s nomination.
The bombast of Apodaca’s campaign and the sprawling ground game of Lujan Grisham’s camp may not be his style.
Still, the senator warns Democrats about taking this election for granted.
After all, who would have thought three years ago that Trump would be president?
“It’s scary,” he said. “Trump got 40 percent of the vote here.”