Timothy E. Kraft (April 10, 1941 – January 21, 2024) was a retired Democratic political consultant, best known as the campaign manager for the unsuccessful reelection bid of U.S. President Jimmy Carter.

In September 1980, only weeks before the general election, he stepped down amid an uncorroborated charge, later resolved, that he had previously used cocaine[citation needed].

Kraft subsequently settled in New Mexico, where in the capital city of Santa Fe he became the executive director of the state Democratic Party.

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.

In 1980, he left the government position to manage Carter's national campaign against Ronald Reagan,[2] who four years earlier had lost the Republican nomination to Gerald Ford.

In 1980, Kraft, Jordan, and Patrick Caddell, the Carter pollster, had shared a house in the Georgetown section of Washington, D.C.[2] 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.

[3] 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.