Castro credits win to anti-‘big money,’ establishment push

Alma Castro was maintaining a slight lead over her closest competitor Tuesday night, but it was the voters who had chosen rival candidate Katherine Rivera as their top choice for a Santa Fe City Council District 1 seat that put her over the top.

The race was called for Castro around 11:30 p.m. after three rounds of vote-tallying in the four-way, ranked-choice race — described by some as an “instant runoff ” — gave her the majority of votes needed to win. She claimed 52%.

“It’s the women vote,” Rivera said in an interview Wednesday after her post-campaign trip to Ten Thousand Waves spa.

While knocking on doors, Rivera spoke to a number of women who wanted to vote for a female candidate and chose her and Castro as their top two, she said. She noted both were new faces, which also might have helped them in a campaign season when many people voiced frustration with the city’s administration.

“Geno was a known quantity, and people want something different,” she said, referring to former City Attorney Geno Zamora, who was in a tight race with Castro for the most of the night and considered by some to be a shoo-in for the council seat.

Castro, who ran a publicly funded campaign with

$22,500, and privately funded Zamora, with a campaign war chest of $82,000, were within 2 percentage points of each another — she at 37% and he at 35% after 8:30 p.m.

Rivera and fellow candidate Brian Gutierrez had each secured 14% of the 7,381 District 1 ballots cast.

News that Castro had surpassed Zamora’s early lead in the evening met with cheers at her watch party at Café Castro, the family restaurant she runs.

“Right now, we are in the lead with no money and lots of soul,” Castro said at the time.

A breakdown of the rankedchoice vote-counting process on the New Mexico secretary of state’s website shows Gutierrez, who had 1019 votes, was knocked out first, around 11 p.m.

Voters’ second-choice candidates then came into play, sending 199 new votes to Castro, 249 to Zamora and 269 to Rivera. That meant neither Castro nor Zamora had secured the nearly 1,000 or 1,100 votes they needed to win.

It also appeared 302 Gutierrez-favoring voters didn’t pick a second choice, leaving their votes “exhausted.”

Castro was at 41% and Zamora 40%.

Rivera was then eliminated and her second-choice votes redistributed, giving Castro 623 more — enough to claim victory — and Zamora 392.

Castro described the success of her campaign as “slaying the dragon” — which she was quick to clarify wasn’t any of her competitors but “big money in politics.”

“I think there was a big anti-establishment sentiment,” she said. Voters “didn’t want someone who was beholden not only to the current establishment, but also big donors.”

She was frank about the difficulty of running a competitive campaign on public funding, which she said involved “a lot of blood, sweat and tears.”

But she believes voters were drawn to the grassroots nature of her campaign.

Zamora has deep connections in state and local politics, which he drew on for financial support and endorsements. This might have hurt his campaign as much as helped it.

He was the only candidate who received a donation from Mayor Alan Webber at a time when criticism of the mayor is on the rise. Some residents might also have harbored mistrust of him over bad advice about a bond issue he gave as city attorney under former Mayor David Coss.

Zamora declined to speculate this week on why his well-funded campaign failed to pull off a win. He offered his congratulations to Castro in an email to supporters Wednesday, and said the “silver lining” of the night for him was the passage of a city excise tax on high-end home sales to fund affordable housing aid.

He also said he’s grateful not to have to do another month of campaigning and fundraising for a runoff election.

“One of the positives of ranked-choice voting is there’s a decision and as a community we get to move forward,” Zamora said.

Castro is in many ways a model of the life she wants to make possible for more Santa Feans. A native of the city with family roots in El Salvador, she spent several years living in Chicago but returned in 2019 to take the reins at Café Castro when her mother decided to retire.

She was able to buy a house in the city before real estate prices went through the roof, starting in 2020, she said, adding she lives in the city with her husband and three dogs.

Her sister, who was living in Washington, D.C., also moved back to Santa Fe — and could be seen knocking on doors for Castro with her baby in tow.

“It all kind of came together in a way that was really fortuitous,” Castro said.

She noted it’s increasingly difficult for native Santa Feans to be able to live and work in the city and take care of their families.

That’s something she’d like to address on the City Council, along with restoring faith in government, something she acknowledged will take time and effort.

A crucial piece of the puzzle is improving communication between residents and the city government, a subject she returned to multiple times over coffee Thursday at Baked and Brew.

“I sound like a broken record, but the more that we meaningfully engage citizens, the stronger this community is going to be,” she said.

The city has taken steps to improve transparency, but a key test will be whether it successfully engages the public as it prepares to overhaul land use codes and the general plan, she said.

She added the city must ensure people feel like they have a voice in development decisions that will shape the city for decades to come.

During her campaign, she pushed back against the idea more housing stock runs counter to preserving Santa Fe’s character, an idea she reiterated Thursday.

“When people say, ‘I don’t want to see a bunch of tall skyscrapers,’ they’re not saying they don’t want more housing,” she said. “They’re saying they want to keep the feel of their hometown. And that’s not impossible.”

Castro will bring a fresh perspective to the council through her many roles: child of an immigrant, first-generation college student, business owner and member of the LGBTQ+ community.

At 35, she’ll also be the youngest city councilor when she takes office.

A self-described “political nerd” who volunteered for the Bernie Sanders campaign while living in Chicago, Castro is a member of the Democratic Socialists of America and the first and only City Council candidate to be endorsed by DSA Santa Fe.

Spokesperson Neal Turnquist said Castro is “exactly the sort of young, independent, progressive voice that Santa Fe needs.”

Like several other candidates across the political spectrum this cycle, Castro downplayed the importance of party affiliation in the race.

“What I love about City Council is that it’s nonpartisan, so there are no aisles,” she said. “I will be farther to the left than many of my colleagues, and I’m used to that.”

Castro credited her organizing background with giving her the tools she needed to run a successful race, which she said included knowing how to make meaningful connections with people on the campaign trail.

Based on her interactions with Santa Fe residents, she said, she doesn’t believe they are jaded about politics. “People are invested, and they want to participate.”