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Chevron gave more. So did ConocoPhillips. Exxon Mobil gave twice as much.
A Capital & Main examination of New Mexico state campaign donations for the 2024 elections shows that the nation’s largest oil and gas production companies have given more to Democratic candidates than to the industry’s traditional Republican allies. Data shows that the top 10 oil and gas industry contributors have given $1.2 million to Democratic state candidates and $1.1 million to Republicans. This is roughly two-thirds of the industry-wide donations to individual candidates in this year’s state elections.
While contributions from 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 a total of $3.7 million. Republicans made up the difference with hundreds of additional donations from smaller companies and individuals in the industry.
This story was originally published by Capital & Main. It is republished here with permission.
The survey 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 deadline for reporting donations made in the last week before the elections is the first week of January. The assessment included oil and gas production companies, industrial support services such as dedicated transportation and pipeline companies, utilities that burn fossil fuels, individuals who identified themselves as employed by those companies and those who listed business addresses for their donations.
Once again, Chevron’s donations dwarfed all others. The company gave $724,000 directly to candidates in state races. The next closest was Marathon Oil at $243,500. The donations from both companies favored Democrats – by a few thousand dollars in the case of Chevron, and by a ratio of more than 2:1 in the case of Marathon Oil.
Oil and gas interests donated 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 once again, donations from the country’s largest producers often went to left-wing groups. Still, Republican groups raised about twice as much PAC money overall as their Democratic counterparts. Dozens of smaller donations from smaller groups upset the balance, with donations from the Yates family – New Mexico’s oilfield dynasty – and their associated companies leading the way.
These trends in New Mexico bear little resemblance to the national campaign spending of the same oil and gas companies. In federal elections, these multinational companies give the vast majority to Republicans: 85% of donations in the case of Chevron and 80% for Marathon Oil, according to federal campaign data collected by OpenSecrets. Overall, oil and gas companies voted 7.5 to 1 in favor of Republican candidates seeking federal office.
“It’s not surprising,” said Michael Rocca, a political scientist and director of the public policy program at the University of New Mexico. “They give money to power.”
Nationally, oil and gas companies and manufacturing are concentrated in Republican states such as Texas, Oklahoma and North Dakota. But in New Mexico, Democrats hold all the power, with comfortable leadership in both the legislature and the governorship and every other major elected office.
Rocca said individual voters, interest groups and even small businesses tend to give based on ideology.
By comparison, business groups behave strategically, he said. “Money buys access.” Rocca argues that huge campaign contributions generally don’t change the way politicians vote, as many think. He said big companies give money to candidates who already vote in their favor. “But what money does most importantly is it protects your allies,” after political access has been forged.
These thoughts are reflected in the response of the largest donor overall. When asked why Chevron gave so much to Democratic candidates in New Mexico, Bill Turenne, global media relations manager at Chevron, said: “We make political contributions to support candidates and organizations from both parties who, like us, believe 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 the one we received in response to questions about $760,000 in campaign contributions the company distributed before the 2020 election: “We make political contributions to support the election of candidates who, like we, believe in the value of responsible oil and gas development. Our contributions are made in accordance with the law.”)
Rocca thinks there is something more going on than that. “[Big companies] see giving money to challengers as a waste of resources,” he said.
“Money absolutely matters in elections.” But it is rarely spent to fight an incumbent, Rocca said. “[Money is] able to deter – first and foremost – quality challengers.”
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 top recipients of fossil fuel money, both Democrats and Republicans, ran unopposed this year, another big difference between state and national races.
Eleven of the state’s top 20 Democratic recipients of oil and gas money ran in uncontested elections. But before that, four of the 11 received a total of $174,000 before losing their primaries to other Democrats who then won the uncontested seats in the general election. Three of the eventual victors received no oil and gas money at all. The fourth received only $1,000.
The access and protections Rocca describes take on a different hue in light of a dramatically changing oil and gas regulatory landscape. President-elect Trump has promised to reduce federal regulations once he takes office. He appointed Lee Zeldin, a former New York congressman, to lead the Environmental Protection Agency, the group spearheading efforts to protect the environment from fossil fuel development. Trump said Zeldin “will ensure fair and swift deregulatory decisions” at the agency.
“The new federal administration and their clear and expressed hostility to public health and safety is very, very frightening,” said New Mexico State Representative Nathan Small of Las Cruces. When he’s not working in the part-time New Mexico Legislature, he is an organizer with the environmental group New Mexico Wild.
The impending federal shift will place more of the industry oversight on the state’s shoulders, and the state has a mixed record in that regard. While New Mexico has adopted some of the nation’s strictest oil and gas regulations, James Kenney, secretary of the state’s Department of the Environment, said his office continues to find that about 50% of gas and oil operations violate emissions regulations. New Mexico is in violation when its inspectors violate New Mexico emissions rules. field. At the Oil Conservation Division, the state’s top industry regulator, the department hired a new attorney in May just to handle 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 must pay to plug those wells so they no longer leak climate-warming gases or soil-polluting oil.
One Democratic politician has risen among the ranks of those who receive oil and gas donations while in the middle of the debates over fossil fuels and the climate. Rep. Small received $16,100 from the industry in the 2022 election. Before his election in 2024, that rose to $87,451 (from just over $385,000 in total donations), making him No. 3 in the state among Democratic recipients of such funds, behind House Speaker Javier Martinez and Chairman of Senate Finance Officer George Muñoz. Between 2020 and 2024, he was promoted to chairman of the House Appropriations and Finance Committee, which also made him vice chairman of the interagency Legislative Finance Committee, two of the most powerful positions in the New Mexico Legislature. And he is one of the few top-money winners to have a contested race this year, which he won by 544 votes out of 14,244 votes cast in his race.
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 big table for people who see challenges and want to propose and propose solutions to those challenges.” Is he soliciting campaign donations from oil and gas companies? “I will engage with stakeholders and will certainly seek support from a wide range of stakeholders for campaign efforts in appropriate ways during campaigns,” he said.
“At the state level, over the last five years, and especially over the last three or four years, [we] have greatly increased the maintenance of our common sense [oil and gas] rules,” Small said. “That has resulted in significantly more fines for people who do the wrong thing.”
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On the other end of the spectrum, Republican Kenneth Brennan ran for a seat in the House of Representatives and lost. He received $350 from two people who work in the industry. “I’m amazed at what I was able to do with $21,000,” he said of his campaign total. “Almost $4,000 of that came out of my own pocket.”
His opponent, incumbent Rep. Matthew McQueen – who also chairs the House Energy, Environment & Natural Resources Committee – received $3,500 from the New Mexico Gas Company.
“That shocks me because he is absolutely anti-oil and gas,” Brennan said. Last session, McQueen co-sponsored two major pieces of industry-related legislation: an update to the state’s decades-old oil and gas law 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 certainly supports the oil and gas industry but has not directly solicited donations. ‘If they want to give me something, it’s all welcome. But if I have to beg, sometimes it’s just not worth it.”
He added: “That’s politics, I guess.”
“The New Mexico Gas Company is a service company and 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 ten years in the Legislature, donors are familiar with my positions, and if they didn’t think I was doing a good job, they wouldn’t donate. People didn’t give Ken Brennan money because he wasn’t a strong candidate and they didn’t think he could win. They were right.”
McQueen won with 4,532 votes out of nearly 20,000 votes cast in his race.
