This story was originally published by Capital & Main. It is republished here with permission.

Chevron gave more. So did ConocoPhillips. Exxon Mobil gave twice as much.

A review by Capital & Main of New Mexico state campaign donations for the 2024 election shows the country’s biggest oil and gas production companies gave more to Democratic candidates than to the industry’s traditional Republican allies. Records show the top 10 oil and gas industry contributors gave $1.2 million to Democratic state candidates while giving $1.1 million to Republicans, comprising roughly two-thirds of the entire industry’s donations to individual candidates in this year’s state elections.

While contributions by major corporations to individuals lean left, total oil and gas donations in the state still favor Republicans, who received $2.1 million compared to $1.6 million for Democrats, for $3.7 million in all. Republicans made up the difference with hundreds more donations from smaller companies and individuals in the industry.

Image

The review found 1,375 donations of $100 or more made by companies or industry personnel to individual candidates during the 2024 election cycle on or before Oct. 29, the last reporting deadline before the Nov. 5 election. The reporting deadline for donations made in the last week before the election is in the first week of January. The review included oil and gas production companies, industry support services such as dedicated trucking and pipeline companies, fossil-fuel-burning utilities, individuals who identified themselves as working at those companies and those who listed company addresses for their donations.

Once again, donations from Chevron dwarfed all others. The company gave $724,000 directly to candidates in state races. The next closest was Marathon Oil at $243,500. Both companies’ donations favored Democrats — by a few thousand dollars in Chevron’s case, and by a more than 2:1 ratio in Marathon Oil’s case.

Oil and gas interests gave another $1.75 million to political action committees, or PACs. Nearly a third of that — $497,000 — came from Chevron alone, bringing the company’s total donations to $1.22 million. And again, donations from the country’s largest producers tended to go to left-leaning groups. Even so, Republican-leaning groups raised about twice as much PAC money overall as did their Democratic counterparts. Dozens of smaller donations from smaller groups swung that balance, with donations from the Yates family — New Mexico’s homegrown oilpatch dynasty — and their related businesses leading the charge.

These New Mexico trends bear little resemblance to national campaign spending by the same oil and gas companies. In federal elections, those multinational firms give overwhelmingly to Republicans: 85 percent of donations in the case of Chevron and 80 percent by Marathon Oil, according to federal campaign data collected by OpenSecrets. Overall, oil and gas companies gave 7.5 to 1 in favor of Republican candidates seeking federal office.

Image

“It is not surprising,” said Michael Rocca, political scientist and director of the public policy program at the University of New Mexico. “They are giving money to power.”

Nationally, oil and gas companies and production are concentrated in Republican-leaning states such as Texas, Oklahoma and North Dakota. But in New Mexico, Democrats hold all the power, with comfortable leads in both legislative branches, as well as the governorship and every other major elected office.

Rocca said individual voters, interest groups and even small companies tend to give based on ideology.

By comparison, business groups behave strategically, he said. “Money buys access.” Rocca argues that huge campaign contributions do not generally change how politicians vote, as many believe. He said large companies give to candidates who already vote in their favor. “But what money does most importantly is it protects your allies,” after political access is forged.

Those thoughts are echoed in the response of the largest overall donor. When asked why Chevron gave so much to Democratic candidates in New Mexico, Bill Turenne, manager of global media relations at Chevron, said, “We make political contributions to support candidates and organizations from both parties that believe, like we do, in the value of responsible energy production and good governance. Our contributions are made in accordance with the law and are posted on our website.”

(Turenne’s answer is strikingly similar to one received in response to questions about $760,000 in campaign contributions the company doled out before the 2020 election: “We make political contributions to support the election of candidates who believe, like we do, in the value of responsible oil and gas development. Our contributions are made in accordance with the law.”)

Rocca thinks there is a bit more to it than that. “[Big companies] see giving money to challengers as a waste of resources,” he said.

“Money matters in elections, absolutely.” But it’s rarely spent to fight an incumbent, Rocca said. “[Money is] able to — first of all — scare off quality challengers.”

Image

That money is one reason why incumbents so often defeat challengers at both the state and federal levels, he said.

In New Mexico, many of the biggest recipients of fossil fuel money, both Democrats and Republicans, ran unopposed this year, another major difference between state and national races.

Eleven of the state’s top-20 Democratic recipients of oil and gas money were in uncontested general election races. But before that, four of the 11 received a total of $174,000, then lost their primaries to other Democrats who went on to win the uncontested seats in the general election. Three of the final victors received no oil and gas money at all. The fourth received just $1,000.

The access and protection that Rocca describes take on a different hue in the face of a dramatically shifting oil and gas regulation landscape. President-elect Trump has vowed to reduce federal regulations once he takes office. He appointed Lee Zeldin, a former congressman from New York, to run the Environmental Protection Agency, the group at the forefront of protecting the environment from fossil fuel development. Trump said that Zeldin will “ensure fair and swift deregulatory decisions” at the agency.

“The incoming federal administration and their clear and voiced hostility to public health and safety are very, very scary,” said New Mexico state Representative Nathan Small of Las Cruces. When not working in New Mexico’s part-time Legislature, he is an organizer with the environmental group New Mexico Wild.

The impending federal shift will place a greater share of industry policing on the state’s shoulders, and the state has a mixed record there. While New Mexico has passed some of the nation’s toughest oil and gas regulations, James Kenney, secretary of the state’s Environment Department, said that his office still finds around 50 percent of gas and oil operations violating New Mexico emissions regulations when his inspectors go into the field. At the Oil Conservation Division, the state’s main industry regulator, the department hired a new lawyer in May just to deal with the thousands of oil and gas wells abandoned by their legal operators across New Mexico. Once the wells are abandoned, the state and federal government are on the hook to pay for plugging those wells so they no longer leak climate-warming gases or ground-fouling oil.

One Democratic politician has raced up the ranks of those receiving oil and gas donations while sitting at the center of the fossil fuel and climate debates. Representative Small received $16,100 from the industry in the 2022 election. For his 2024 election, that rose to $87,451 (of just over $385,000 in total donations), making him No. 3 in the state among Democratic recipients of such funds, after House Speaker Javier Martinez and Senate Finance Chairman George Muñoz. Between 2020 and 2024 he was promoted to chair the House Appropriations and Finance Committee, which also made him vice chair of the overarching Legislative Finance Committee, two of the most powerful positions in New Mexico’s Legislature. And he is one of the few top money recipients to have a contested race this year, which he won by 544 votes out of 14,244 cast in his race.

Image

Does the combination of conservation work and oil and gas money make him uncomfortable? “No,” he said. “I want to have an open door and a large table for folks who see challenges and want to propose and bring solutions to those challenges.” Does he solicit campaign donations from oil and gas companies? “I engage with stakeholders, and certainly will, in appropriate ways, during campaigns, ask for support from a wide range of stakeholders for campaign efforts,” he said.

“At the state level, over the past five years, and particularly in the past three or four years, [we] have significantly increased enforcement of our common sense [oil and gas] rules,” Small said. “That’s resulted in significantly more fines for folks who are doing the wrong thing.”

At the other end of the spectrum, Republican Kenneth Brennan ran for a House seat and lost. He received $350 from two people who work in the industry. “I’m surprised at what I was able to do with $21,000,” he said of his campaign total. “Almost $4,000 of that was out of my own pocket.”

His opponent, incumbent Representative Matthew McQueen — who is also the chair of the House Energy, Environment & Natural Resources Committee — received $3,500 from the New Mexico Gas Company.

“That shocks me, because he is definitely anti-oil and gas,” Brennan said. In the last session, McQueen co-sponsored two major pieces of industry-related legislation: an update to the state’s decades-old Oil and Gas Act and an increase in royalty rates on state lands. The first died on House Speaker Martinez’s desk without being heard by the chamber. The second died in a committee chaired by Senator Muñoz.

Brennan said he definitely supports the oil and gas industry but didn’t directly solicit its donations. “If they want to give to me, it’s all welcomed. But if I have to go begging, then sometimes it’s just not worth it.”

He added, “That’s politics, I guess.”

“The New Mexico Gas Company is a service utility, not an ‘oil and gas’ producer. I don’t take money from oil and gas companies,” McQueen said. “I recognize that ‘gas’ is in their name, but they play a fundamentally different role.”

He continued, “After 10 years in the Legislature, donors are familiar with my positions, and if they didn’t think that I was doing a good job, they wouldn’t donate. People didn’t give money to Ken Brennan because he wasn’t a strong candidate and they didn’t think he could win. They were right.”

McQueen won by 4,532 votes out of nearly 20,000 cast in his race.

Source New Mexico is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Source New Mexico maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Shaun Griswold for questions: info@sourcenm.com. Follow Source New Mexico on Facebook and X.