New Mexico gubernatorial candidate Sam Bregman looks the part of an outlaw in the B-roll video on his campaign website, sporting a close-cropped, salt-and-pepper beard and a cowboy hat as he rides a horse through the high desert. 

But growing up in suburban Bethesda, Md., Sam Bregman’s life was more Beltway establishment than High Plains Drifter. 

His father Stan, a lawyer and political activist, was introduced to his wife by Hubert Humphrey, the Minnesota Democratic senator and, later, vice president. But what the younger Bregman took from his father was not politics — rather, it was baseball: Stan Bregman represented the Washington Senators in the 1960s before the baseball team moved to Houston. 

The sport, which Bregman played growing up, was what initially brought him to New Mexico. He moved to the state to play baseball at the University of New Mexico, but that dream faded quickly. 

“When I first got out to New Mexico, I figured out fairly quickly that I wasn’t that good in baseball, perhaps as good as I thought I was at the time, and I ended up not not playing for the University of New Mexico very long,” Bregman told Jewish Insider in an interview this month. “I ended up going, my brother and I, moving to a rural area just outside of Albuquerque and raising roping and cutting horses, and loved every bit of it.” 

Baseball still lives on in the Bregman family — Bregman’s son, Alex, is the star third baseman on the Chicago Cubs, and one of the highest-paid players in Major League Baseball — but Sam Bregman chose to follow his father’s lead and become a lawyer, and to get involved in politics. 

“I realized I could accomplish good. I was a precinct chairman of the Democratic Party when I was 18 years old in this rural place where my brother and I moved up to, and it made a big impact on my life in the sense that I realized I could be an advocate and get certain things done for the community,” said Bregman.

Bregman was elected to the Albuquerque City Council in the 1990s, and he introduced the state’s first hate crimes ordinance during that time. He spent most of his career as a lawyer in private practice before Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham, a Democrat, tapped him to be district attorney of Bernalillo County, home to Albuquerque, in 2023. He was elected to a full term in 2024. 

Now mounting a gubernatorial bid, Bregman will face Deb Haaland, a former congresswoman who served as interior secretary in the Biden administration, in the Democratic primary on June 2. Seeking to win in a state that leans blue but isn’t a lock for Democrats, Bregman is positioning himself as a moderate who is focused on kitchen-table issues.

“On the political spectrum, many people call me a moderate. I’m not part of the radical left of our party. It’s very frustrating to see the radical left and the radical right. I’m somewhere in the middle who just wants to get things done, to better the quality of life for people, and very policy-oriented,” Bregman said. 

But even as a moderate, Bregman is taking aim at Immigrations and Customs Enforcement as the federal agency targets undocumented immigrants across the country, and faces increasing criticism of its heavy-handed tactics. 

“People are scared. People don’t want this for the future of our country. And I can tell you, I’m someone who is going to push back at every opportunity when this president does things that hurt New Mexicans, and what we’re seeing in other parts of this country is unacceptable,” said Bregman. “Using brutality on our fellow citizens — this is not the America that I see for the future. This is something far more troubling.” 

Bregman is a proud member of Albuquerque’s small Jewish community. Around 100 years ago, his grandfather fled to Baltimore from Russia. 

“He always said the greatest thing his parents ever did for him was to get him to America. I’ll never forget that,” Bregman said of his father, who was born in the U.S. 

His family’s story drives his support for immigrants and his opposition to ICE. Bregman said he was shocked by the “horrific” reports from Minneapolis last month, where federal immigration officials killed two American citizens during protests surrounding immigration enforcement actions in the region. 

“It reminds me, quite frankly, of what I’ve learned in history in the 1930s in Europe. We are seeing people who are being stopped with no reasonable suspicion, probable cause or an arrest warrant, based not on some criminal activity, but based on perhaps the color of their skin or the accent that they have, and asked for no valid reason to show them their papers to prove that they’re a United States citizen. That is not the America I grew up in,” said Bregman. “I’m going to stand up and be heard.”

As Bregman travels around the state for his first statewide race, he’ll be talking to voters about his record as a prosecutor and an activist in the state Democratic Party. But on the weekends, he still tries to visit the ranch where he used to raise cattle.

“I still try and get up there a couple times a month,” Bregman said, “and try and ride the horse as much as I can.”