Kraft first worked in a political campaign in
1970 on behalf of
Jesse Unruh, the former Democratic
Speaker of the California State Assembly, who failed to prevent the reelection of
Ronald W. Reagan as
governor of California, but later served as the California
state treasurer. Kraft subsequently settled in New Mexico, where in the capital city of
Santa Fe he became the executive director of the state Democratic Party. Though a paid position, he had to engage in the necessary fundraising to guarantee that he was indeed compensated. In 1974, Kraft worked to elect the
liberal Jerry Apodaca as
governor. Apodaca was running in a close contest against the
conservative Republican
Joe Skeen, later a long-term member of the
United States House of Representatives. As the party executive director, Kraft met Carter, still the
governor of Georgia, who came to New Mexico on Apodaca's behalf. The case against Kraft centered on his short-term predecessor as the 1980 campaign manager,
Evan Dobelle, who claimed to have witnessed Kraft using the narcotic in 1978 in New Orleans. on the grounds that the "evidence did not warrant an
indictment". Still Kraft was saddled with nearly $60,000 in unreimbursed legal expenses; later the Reagan administration obtained passage of a law that reimburses persons in such situations when cleared of wrongdoing, but the measure was not retroactive to cover Kraft. Similarly, another special prosecutor had earlier cleared the Carter chief of staff,
Hamilton Jordan, of the same offense. Kraft and Jordan were close friends who had worked together from the beginning of the Carter national campaign. In 1980, Kraft, Jordan, and
Patrick Caddell, the Carter pollster, had shared a house in the
Georgetown section of Washington, D.C. As the national campaign manager, Kraft was like Carter considered skilled in the details of politics; he organized the group known as the "Hispanic American Democrats" to increase the turnout of
Hispanics, already Democratic in orientation but then known for less voter participation than the other minority groups. Working with Kraft was
Robert Schwarz Strauss, a friend of U.S. Senator
Lloyd M. Bentsen of Texas; Bentsen had also been a Carter primary rival in 1976. Strauss was in 1980 the chairman of the
Democratic National Committee with responsibility for fund-raising and making the needed contacts with national party leaders and media representatives. In the 1980s, through his company Avanti Ltd., Kraft became heavily involved as a consultant in political campaigns in Latin America, an area in which he had developed rapport while he was in the Peace Corps. In 2003, he appeared in the failed campaign of former
Governor Howard Dean of
Vermont, who was attempting to win the Democratic nomination in
2004 to deny Republican President
George W. Bush a second term in the
White House. ==Retirement==