When Diane Denish was elected lieutenant governor, she didn’t think too much about the glass ceiling she’d just shattered.
“But when I looked down over a crowd of several hundred people and saw my name on signs and stuff,” she said, “I was pretty overwhelmed.”
The Democrat became the first — and so far, only — woman to hold the position in 2003, when she and Gov. Bill Richardson stepped into the Roundhouse. There, she became known for her drive to tackle early childhood issues and support small businesses.
It is now approaching 15 years since Denish left office.
She resides in an Albuquerque house with big windows and a shih tzu named Molly, writing a regular political column for nm.news and paying close attention, still, to problems impacting young children. She has a collection of frog figurines and a wall dedicated to photographs of her and various U.S. presidents.
She sticks by Richardson, who died in 2023 and faced several scandals throughout his career.
And she voiced few regrets about the way her career — including a failed bid for governor in 2010 — unfolded.
“I wouldn’t have traded my experience, especially my campaign experience or my governing experience,” Denish said. “And I worked hard every day.”
‘You’re going to do what?’
Denish’s involvement in politics started young. The daughter of New Mexico Rep. Jack Daniels — a Hobbs Democrat who was in office from 1967 to 1970 and afterward ran unsuccessfully for governor — Denish said she enjoyed door-knocking for her father and recalled having political debates when she was in middle school.
Denish earned a bachelor’s degree from the University of New Mexico, then moved to Farmington with her first husband. Later, she moved to Albuquerque, where she started a market research business called The Target Group.
A 2002 article in The New Mexican cited a three-month stint as a commercial real estate leasing agent as the worst job she’d ever worked.
Denish first ran for lieutenant governor in 1994. Then a new face in politics, Denish took particular note of the makeup of the state Capitol, where women held only 19.6% of legislative seats.
“The first time I ran, there were all these — I don’t mean this in an unkind way, but — good old boys who sat around in the Legislature and talked about how great they were and none of us had paid our dues,” Denish said. “Well, the only way you can pay your dues is to get in the game.”
The decision to run was rather spur-of-the-moment, prompted by then-Lt. Gov. Casey Luna challenging Gov. Bruce King in the Democratic gubernatorial primary. When she told her father and husband she was planning to throw her hat in the ring, Denish recalled, their collective response was, “You’re going to do what?”
But Denish had always believed the lieutenant governor position could be bigger than what it had been. And she was interested in early childhood, access to capital for female business owners and payday loans.
“I said that on the campaign trail: ‘This is an $85,000-a-year job, and it needs to be more,’ ” she said. “You need to be a real partner; you need to work on these issues.”
Denish lost her primary. But this wasn’t a deterrent: Four years later, Denish was back, this time winning her primary against then-Secretary of State Stephanie Gonzales.
Denish and her running mate, Martin Chavez, were then defeated by Republican Gov. Gary Johnson in the 1998 general election.
Third time’s a charm
By 2002, Denish, by then chair of the state Democratic Party, said she was ready to give up the lieutenant governor dream.
Then Richardson called.
“He said, ‘Well, you’re going to run for lieutenant governor again, aren’t you?’ and I said ‘No, I’m not, Bill,’ ” Denish recalled.
Richardson vowed to clear Denish’s primary path and asserted the two of them would win. Denish thought it over and stepped down as party chair, telling The New Mexican that May, “This time I’m going to win the primary and the general election.”
Richardson did not clear her path, but her prediction came true. Their November victory was widely referred to as a landslide.
That election night, Denish’s team felt like they were “on the brink of promise and opportunity,” said Claire Dudley Chavez, a former campaign staffer who is now the policy director in the office of state House Speaker Javier Martínez.
Chavez worked on all of Denish’s lieutenant governor campaigns, beginning as a volunteer during a summer break from college. After the first two losses, Chavez said she stuck around because she believed in Denish and in supporting women entering political office.
“What I really admire about Diane is that she is confident,” Chavez said. “She remains steadfast in her convictions. She’s ambitious. She challenged me — in a good way — to really find my voice and be really clear about what it was that I believed in.”
Armed with a bigger staff and a bigger budget, Denish took office and immediately voiced her priorities to Richardson. She believes the effectiveness of a lieutenant governor is dependent upon their relationship with the governor.
“In order to make it something you can build on and work on policy issues, you have to have a governor who is going to help you make that happen, because in the end, they’ll get credit if you do good stuff — because they sign the bills and they do all that,” Denish said. “And I felt like Bill Richardson was that person.”
Denish was ahead of the curve in a few areas. She pushed to decrease poverty for families by ending payday lending — short-term, high-cost loans often noted for spurring debt cycles — long before the 2023 law that would finally shrink the cap on small loan interest rates.
And she led efforts to offer free pre-K to New Mexico’s 4-year-olds two decades before the state became the first in the nation to offer free universal child care — something her daughter, Suzanne Schreiber, said Denish deserves acknowledgment for.
“You can’t underestimate her influence on what’s happening today in New Mexico,” said Schreiber, who serves as a Democratic state representative in Tulsa, Okla. “Everyone is touting the free child care and investment in early childhood there, and she has been talking about that for 40 years.”
Denish’s influence, Schreiber said, is part of why her daughter ran for the Tulsa school board in 2014. And when she decided to run for the Oklahoma House, she said, Denish was supportive every step of the way.
“One of the best things that my mom has given me as a public servant is she has always been willing to work with anyone, as long as they’re serious about solving problems,” Schreiber said. “And she doesn’t make a decision about someone by their label.”
Richardson controversy
Though the Richardson era began with excitement, controversy soon stirred.
Richardson had an early reputation for often touching people he was interacting with. A 2005 article about him in the Albuquerque Journal, with the headline “Hands-On Governor,” quoted Denish as saying she found this tendency irritating.
Denish said she never saw Richardson do anything she would consider “in a really inappropriate way,” though she recalled reminding him to tone it down while he was running for president in 2007.
“People always made these allegations about Bill — none of which I could ever substantiate,” Denish said.
In some people’s eyes, “he was kind of a flirt, so that also equated to being a philanderer,” she added. “And I said to somebody: ‘He doesn’t have the attention span to be a philanderer.’ ”
Richardson was subject to a federal grand jury investigation in 2011 after accusations he raised $250,000 from supporters to quiet a woman who had threatened to file a sexual harassment complaint.
More recently, his name has appeared multiple times in documents relating to convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, who owned a ranch in southern Santa Fe County. In an unsealed deposition, Virginia Giuffre — who filed a civil suit against Epstein and died by suicide earlier this year — alleged Epstein co-conspirator Ghislaine Maxwell sent Giuffre to New Mexico to perform a “massage” on Richardson.
Richardson’s attorneys and spokespeople have maintained Richardson and Epstein were not friends and Richardson only visited the ranch once.
Denish said she remembered Richardson talking about Epstein’s purchase of the ranch, but she never saw Epstein at the governor’s office.
“You know, men love money,” Denish said. “… And maybe he flew around with him, but I would bet my bottom dollar that Bill Richardson never had anything to do with young girls or anything like that.”
A run for governor
By Richardson’s last year as governor, his approval rating had dwindled to 33%. A January 2010 edition of The New Mexican noted people worked to link Denish to the faults of his administration.
“Everybody blamed me for everything Bill Richardson ever did,” Denish said. “They hardly blamed me for anything I did.”
Denish hadn’t set her eyes on the governorship before she stepped into her second-in-command role. But once she was there, she started thinking about it, and she launched her bid in 2009, going toe-to-toe with Republican Susana Martinez and distancing herself from Richardson.
The 2010 race was historic — one of only a handful of woman versus woman gubernatorial contests the country had ever seen.
When Martinez won, becoming the first female governor of New Mexico and the first female Hispanic governor in the U.S., Denish wasn’t wholly surprised. The same party had never won three gubernatorial elections in a row, nor had a lieutenant governor ascended to governor, except in the case of death.
“I understood the desire, on behalf of Hispanic women, to want to have somebody like them,” Denish added.
Schreiber recalled the loss as painful, but said Denish has never been a person to complain or wallow.
“She probably took it better than any of us,” Schreiber said. “She always tells me, as a politician, ‘You go into a race 50-50. There is absolutely no guarantee.’ ”
Reflecting now, Denish noted she would have liked to have been governor, but she was happy she had more time to spend with her husband, Herb, who died in 2022.
“We were still involved in politics, but we could do stuff we wouldn’t have been able to do,” Denish said. “And so looking back retrospectively, that was a blessing.”
Denish, now
Denish has continued to play a role behind the scenes. She has raised money for day cares, testified in front of committees and worked on her column.
Denish also remains close with Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham, who served as the state health secretary from 2004 to 2007. Last year, Denish faced allegations of using her political connections to have plans tossed for a park in her neighborhood; she admitted at the time she had called Lujan Grisham to request the park’s funds be vetoed.
Otherwise, Denish is not often in the news. She spends time with her three children — offering advice, baking the family-favorite apricot pie — and eight grandchildren.
She’s also watched the statehouse shift, notably attaining a female majority last year. But she hopes to eventually see lawmakers think more broadly, rather than just embracing single issues.
“I love seeing the numbers change for us, to be able to say we have a majority of women in the Legislature,” Denish said. “But I don’t think that matters nearly as much as being able to make some progress or work together.”