As the baseball coach of Cobre High, which was the smallest triple-A school in New Mexico, Howie Morales led his team to four state championship games in nine years.
He told his players they could win a state title, no matter how many people discounted them, because they were always the poorest, the least publicized, the underdog. The Cobre Indians believed him. They won the state championship in 2008.
That also happened to be the year that Morales became a state senator and started building a reputation throughout New Mexico on the news pages as well as in the sports section. Morales served on the Senate Finance Committee that made painful cuts during the great recession to maintain balanced state budgets. With a doctorate in education, Morales also became one of the Legislature’s leaders on school policy.
Now Morales, of Silver City, is running for governor. Boyish-looking at 41, he is the youngest of five Democrats competing for the party’s nomination to oppose Republican Gov. Susana Martinez. She has five times as much money as all the Democratic candidates combined, but Morales says his mindset is the same as it was during his days coaching Cobre.
“I’ve never once believed this race wasn’t winnable,” he said one recent day in Santa Fe.
His obstacles are money and lack of name recognition. Morales ranks fourth in fundraising among the five Democratic candidates. A poll released in late March by Public Policy Polling showed Morales with 15 percent support, second among the five Democrats, but 19 points behind the leader, state Attorney General Gary King.
Morales says not only is Martinez beatable, but he is the candidate who matches up best against her. He said his personal drive, experience in government and Hispanic heritage are the ingredients to inspire Democrats and win over Republicans dissatisfied with the state’s path under Martinez.
Morales has waged numerous high-profile battles against the governor since she took office in 2011.
He was one of four legislators who sued Martinez’s administration after it ordered 10,000 foreign nationals with New Mexico driver’s licenses to appear in Albuquerque or Las Cruces to prove that they were residents of the state. A state district judge issued a permanent injunction against Martinez’s maneuver, begun as she waged a campaign to repeal a state law that enables people without proof of immigration status to obtain a New Mexico driver’s license.
Martinez said the residency checks exposed fraud caused by the licensing law. Morales countered that Martinez trampled the constitutional rights of U.S. citizens and many legal immigrants with driver’s licenses. One of them was his sister-in-law, who had been a lawful U.S. resident for 14 years.
He also was among lawmakers who sued Martinez’s education secretary-designate, Hanna Skandera, after she implemented a rule tying teacher evaluations to their students’ performances on standardized tests. Another gubernatorial candidate, Sen. Linda Lopez of Albuquerque, also was party to that suit.
The Legislature had declined to approve a bill for the teacher evaluation system Martinez wanted. Skandera forged ahead anyway. “We can’t afford to wait,” she said.
Skandera won in the state Supreme Court and state District Court to keep the evaluation system in place. Another appeal is pending.
Even one of Martinez’s proudest accomplishments — legislation assigning grades of A, B, C, D or F to the state’s 830 public schools — has been challenged by Morales.
He says the grading system is volatile and inaccurate. Morales in 2013 persuaded the Legislature to approve his reform bill to fine-tune the formula while keeping the A-F grades. Martinez vetoed it.
Morales initially opposed the A-F grading system, one of 10 senators who voted against it in 2011.
He has connected with teachers, who could be an important voting bloc in the primary and general elections. The American Federation of Teachers has endorsed him, helping him move to the top position on the ballot with a win at the Democrats’ pre-primary convention.
Teachers still talk about Morales’ persistence on revising the school grading formula, and how his efforts led to a surprising admission by Martinez’s administration. One of her deputy education secretaries, Paul Aguilar, said the A-F grading system for schools was so convoluted that no more than five people in the state could understand it.
Morales grew up in Silver City, the oldest of four children. His father was a copper miner and his mother an educational assistant in schools.
“My dad didn’t graduate from high school, but he valued education,” Morales said.
Young Howie was a strong student and a gifted athlete. As a collegiate shortstop, he even drew a bit of interest from a scout with the Cleveland Indians. The scout suggested Morales, who had played for hometown Western New Mexico University, should transfer to a bigger school after Western dropped its baseball program in 1993, after Morales’ sophomore season.
But the additional cost of transferring was out of the question for Morales, who had academic scholarships at Western and was helping support his family as a shoe salesman at a local store.
Across the years, busts in the mining industry had created some hard times in the Morales household. Family members stood in line for government milk and cheese, an experience that left a lasting impression on Morales.
“I know the value of a dollar,” he says.
He remained at Western New Mexico, where he received his bachelor’s and master’s degrees in bilingual special education. Years later, in 2007, he went on to receive his doctorate in educational management from New Mexico State University in Las Cruces.
Teaching and coaching were his first jobs, but politics was soon in the mix. Morales won election as the Grant County clerk in 2004.
Then-Gov. Bill Richardson, a Democrat, appointed Morales to the state Senate in 2008 after the death of Sen. Ben Altamirano. Martinez’s campaign staff, persistent critics of Richardson, seized on Morales’ connection to the former governor as soon as Morales announced his own run for the state’s top office.
Her camp criticizes Morales as a candidate who would return to “the failed policies of Bill Richardson.” On another occasion, Martinez’s campaign staff said, “Morales cannot conceal his out-of-the-mainstream record, which includes voting to reinstate the food tax on hardworking New Mexicans.”
Legislators approved the food tax in 2010, but Richardson vetoed it. Morales said the veto meant another $68 million in state cutbacks, all of them made while Martinez was still a district attorney in Las Cruces.
After his appointment to the Senate, Morales was elected twice, in 2008 and 2012. He took a job as a hospital administrator after becoming a senator. Morales said he decided against working in teaching or school administration because he was spending considerable time in Santa Fe on his legislative work.
Morales says he always knew he someday would run for governor. He says this is the right time, despite Martinez’s bulging bank account, because the state has regressed under her in critical areas such as jobs, mental health care and child well-being.
At Cobre, where the baseball park is named after Morales, he always told his players to adopt “a-second-to-none mentality.”
Morales says he is doing the same and that it’s no coincidence his reading list during the campaign includes Malcolm Gladwell’s David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants.
Contact Milan Simonich at 986-3080 or msimonich@sfnewmexican.com.
