ABQ election financing system sets high bar for public funds

ALBUQUERQUE — As the dust settles on the first-ever run to qualify for public financing in an Albuquerque mayoral campaign, one question on a lot of minds is whether the bar to qualify is set too high.

Candidates had to collect 3,287 contributions of $5 each from registered Albuquerque voters in a six-week period ending March 31.

Those who pulled it off get $1 for every registered voter in the state, or about $328,000, minus any seed money they collected. They can then use those funds to run the remainder of their mayoral campaign.

According to Matt Brix, former head of Common Cause who’s credited by city councilors as a policy resource in crafting the system, the original intent of the $5 contributions was to ensure that large sums of public money weren’t too easy for people to tap into.

“All full public financing systems have to balance two competing interests: giving a candidate who forswears raising money from special interests the chance to finance their campaign, while also making sure the candidate can demonstrate solid support among the electorate,” Brix explained. “This is the inherent trade-off in public financing systems.”

In the end, three candidates qualified: former state Senate President Pro Tem Richard Romero, state Rep. Richard Berry, and current Mayor Martin Chavez.

But a couple of prominent candidates — city councilors Michael Cadigan and Debbie O’Malley — dropped out at the midway point, saying it had become clear that they wouldn’t be able to make the deadline.

Political science professor Tim Krebs, who specializes in urban politics at the University of New Mexico, said he was surprised when O’Malley and Cadigan dropped out, and that the outcome shows “organization matters” when it comes to Albuquerque’s public financing system.

“Romero was in the state Senate for a decade and then ran two citywide campaigns for Congress that taught him a lot about going up against an incumbent, all of which has given him a citywide network from which to raise money and build an organization,” Krebs explained.

“Berry doesn’t have a particularly high profile, but the Republican Party is his organizational base,” he continued. “The party went all out to get him qualified.”

While Albuquerque city elections are ostensibly nonpartisan, Berry is the lone Republican in the race and enjoyed the full support of the state Republican Party in efforts to qualify for public financing. He benefited from a measure finance committee that was set up in early March to support his campaign. All other candidates were Democrats, so they couldn’t count on similar support coming from their party.

As for Chavez, Krebs concluded that his organization in large part rests on his “incumbency advantage.”

“Chavez is a three-term mayor with a citywide reach,” Krebs said. “He has an organization he runs called the executive branch. He has people he can go to for support.”

But O’Malley and Cadigan, he said, didn’t have the citywide reach or an established organization of that scope, so they needed to build an organization from scratch.

In their reflections about the process, O’Malley and Cadigan touched on the advance preparations that Richard Romero undertook for the campaign.

On Jan. 1, Romero had an exploratory committee in place that was full of other elected officials, and he focused right away on raising seed money in order to get several campaign staff hired, a level of staffing early on that no other candidate had — officially anyway.

“You have to get started in earnest,” O’Malley said. “Richard [Romero] did that. He was talking to people the year before.”

Cadigan made similar remarks.

“You have to decide to run much earlier and start getting organized in late winter of the year before,” he said. “Richard pulled it off, with a big push at the end, which might have been because a lot of the groups of volunteers who I thought would be helpful sat on the sidelines until we dropped out.”

When they dropped out of the race, both O’Malley and Cadigan expressed support for the system even while noting how difficult it was to gather the $5 contributions.

The normal field work of getting petition signatures didn’t quite apply to the contribution-gathering process, they pointed out. Obtaining contributions was more time-consuming, for example, because canvassers had to explain the new system to most potential donors. On top of that, many people don’t happen to have $5 or a checkbook on them when they’re asked, making donations logistically difficult.

O’Malley said she thinks she would have been able to meet the goal had she had more time.

“Given that we have four weeks to gather 300 to 400 contributions for a City Council race, it doesn’t make sense to have just two extra weeks for basically 10 times as many contributions for a mayor’s race,” she said.

And Cadigan questioned the reason for gathering the $5 contributions, saying he was no longer sure about the purpose.

“If the idea was that you had to get out and knock on doors to show you have support, well, I don’t think the mayor did any of that,” Cadigan said. “And Richard Berry was in the state Legislature almost the whole time. He wasn’t out talking to voters — the Republican Party did it for him. I’m not knocking their operation, just pointing out that gathering those contributions doesn’t mean the candidate will be out doing it himself.

“So while it seemed to make sense at the time,” Cadigan continued, “now I find myself wondering what the purpose of collecting the contributions is. Why not up the number of petition signatures a candidate has to gather instead?”