Independent candidate for NM governor Ken Miyagishima says he uses ‘policies from all parties’
Independent gubernatorial candidate Ken Miyagishima says he draws from policies across party lines, outlining positions on immigration, tourism and governance after leaving the Democratic primary.
Former four-term Las Cruces mayor considers himself a moderate
Joshua Bowling, Source New Mexico
This article was originally published by Source New Mexico.
Ken Miyagishima, the longtime Las Cruces mayor who dropped out of the June 2 Democratic primary race to be New Mexico’s next governor, still sees a path to the fourth floor of the Roundhouse as an independent.
Miyagishima spoke Monday evening at the Albuquerque Journal’s ongoing candidate and community leader town hall series. He said he wants to move away from division in politics, “undo” the Immigrant Safety Act that prevents local governments in the state from signing detention contracts with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and build a robust tourism economy.
“In order to move this state forward, I feel that I have to use policies from all parties,” he said. “I’m a moderate. I want to make sure the money’s there, but I also have a social conscience.”
Indeed, Miyagishima often took stances on both sides of the aisle regarding hot-button issues that came up in this year’s legislative session.
At one point, he expressed misgivings about the Trump administration’s approach to immigrant detention and acknowledged his father’s time in a Japanese internment camp during WWII, but also said he’d work to repeal the Immigrant Safety Act because he feared it could cost small towns one of their only economic lifelines.
Regarding another controversial statewide topic, he said he is “all for a clean environment, I love to breathe clean air” and didn’t want to see utility companies being sold, but said he thought the state’s clean energy goals were unrealistic for companies like PNM and led them to seek to be acquired by private equity firms.
At another point, he said he doesn’t “really like abortion,” but said he is pro-choice and doesn’t think it’s the government’s place “to tell you what to do with your body.”
Miyagishima in February announced he was dropping out of the Democratic race for governor and would instead run as an independent, meaning his name won’t appear on the ballot for the June 2 primary election. He dropped out just one day before the New Mexico Secretary of State’s deadline for candidates to file their qualifying signatures to make the ballot. He would have needed about 2,500 signatures as a Democrat. Independents, by comparison, need more than 14,000 to make the November general election ballot.
The number of statewide voters leaving major parties has significantly increased in recent years. Between December 2024 and February 2026, about 25,000 New Mexicans registered as “decline to state” although the state’s total number of voters stayed relatively flat.
Miyagishima said the state branch of former presidential candidate Andrew Yang’s Forward Party asked him to consider running under their banner, but he had concerns about confusing voters who might not have heard of the party.
Miyagishima spoke often of his time as a local leader, both on the Doña Ana County Board of Commissioners and as the mayor of the state’s second-largest city. He said he would employ a similar leadership style as governor.
“I had one vote … of the six council members, I had to convince three of them to see things my way,” he said, adding that he’d take a similar approach at the Capitol. “The bottleneck is in the Legislature.”
He said he is “not here to shut down oil and gas,” but acknowledged that the state’s largest economic drivers are extractive industry and government jobs. He expressed some skepticism around the large economic proposals on his home turf, including the massive OpenAI and Oracle data center development Project Jupiter, and said its approval at the county commission level seemed rushed.
Damien Willis
“I dealt with counties for eight years and cities for 22 years. I know that when someone runs something through that fast, there’s something there that I don’t like,” he said. “It’s like saying, ‘I’m running for governor, just vote for me.’ You don’t even know what I stand for.”
He said he’d like to significantly boost New Mexico’s tourism industry and employ an economic development strategy similar to what he’s seen in Florida.
“They have Disney World and they have the beach,” he said. “We have the Camino Real Trail and we have Route 66 … Imagine if you could stay on a trail that was used umpteen years ago, or 200 years ago or 150 years ago.”
Joshua Bowling is a senior reporter for Source New Mexico. He's reported in New Mexico, where he broke stories of lavish spending at Western New Mexico University and more, since 2022.
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