Candidates on the Upswing Part 1

So I've been keeping on eye on a few races and trying to measure how candidates are doing. This is anecdotal at best, but I am most-impressed with a couple of candidates' performance in particular, though they both owe their success in large part to someone else.

Lets start down in the valley in HD 75. This races have been a roller coaster since the get-go. Chente out, Willie in, Art Fierro in, Hector Enriquez in. Hector was hall-of-fame bad when I first met him. Of all the candidates I have ever interviewed for any office in El Paso, on and off the air, he was the most ill-prepared for the position.

Seriously, it was embarrassing. I still cringe when I hear the audio.

Then Mary Gonzalez blew in from Austin out of no where. I met with her before she ran and she asked for my opinion, I told her she should actually live in El Paso for a little while and learn about the community before she started to run around and tell people she wanted to represent the area.

But Gonzalez chose to run anyway and in the first reporting period, she out-fund raised everyone. Mostly because she got a big fat check from Austin.

QUICK SIDEBAR - Austin always dumps a pant-load of money in to El Paso legislative races. There is nothing unique about it. It happens every election. If you don't believe me, go a check it out. It sucks that there is so much influence from Austin, but its been like that for a long freakin' time.

So Gonzalez became the little campaign that could. She was a whirlwind of energy. She was everywhere.

Her biggest problem has always been the fact that she is so inconsistent in performance. Once in a while she's great. She can be on-point, engaging, and flat our impressive.

Once in a while. The rest of the time she's pretty average and there are several times where she's been flat-out bad at speaking. Which is weird because she's a teacher so you'd expect communications to be her strong-suit.

And then...poof...she disappeared. If you read her twitter feed, it almost seems like she suffers from misplaced priorities. At times it seems she's more focused on her sorority (I'm not making that up) than she is on her campaign.

Her problems are two-fold. #1 and by far her biggest problem, is Austin. She spends too much time there and for some reason she is letting those people call the shots in the campaign. That's what happens when you don't know the district. You don't have the frame of reference to say, Hey high-priced fancy know-it-all consultants, you don't know what you are talking about and can't quarterback a campaign when you are hundreds of miles away!

Her other problem is that she's a victim of her own success. She's an over-achiever. I think she actually gets board if she doesn't have too much on her plate. And she has too much on her plate. She needs to figure out what her priorities are. If she really wants to be the next state rep, then she needs to ditch all the other causes, groups, organizations, the entire freakin' city of Austin, and her sorority sisters and actually do some block walking.

Personally.

I've been hearing a lot of complaints from people that they have never met her and that she has almost no signage. Personally I think the signage criticism is misplaced because every election cycle there are people with a boat load of signs that don't win because that's all their campaigning activities are confined to.

Its nice that she has teamed up with Chente Quintanilla's campaign to a degree and has his grandson helping her put up a few signs, but she really has to get it in gear. I don't know what happened all of a sudden but she has dropped off the radar. I think it might be money, which would explain why she's always in Austin in guess.

Bottom line here is that I think she's on the down-swing and I think Hector Enriquez, despite a temper tantrum, is on the upswing.

Enriquez's biggest weapon is the fact that he's a salesman. You meet the guy and you immediately think that there is a car lot on Montana missing a sales guy. He's the king of telling people what the thinks they want to hear.

And you know what? He's damn good at it.

That gives him a big advantage because while Gonzalez is practically still living in Austin trying to shake money out of the money tree so she can run her campaign, Enriquez is knocking on doors.

And here's a little secret, he's knocking on the right ones. He's knocking so much that OTHER campaigns are using the presence of his signage to navigate their way through neighborhoods to find the targeted voters they are looking for.

He's still extremely vulnerable if he gets taken off of his script and I still think Gonzalez knows more policy that he does in her sleep, but nonetheless, Enriquez is on the upswing.

Gonzalez should be nervous. Very nervous.

Oh yeah, and then there's Tony San Roman. He ran in HD 76 last time. Wasn't a factor then, isn't a factor now. He's banking on a relationship with the Serna family to pan out for him. They are the most influential family in the valley this side of the Gandara's, but even they can't help San Roman. He's just not cut out to be a candidate. I heard he was being shopped around in Austin earlier in the race by the Serna's though.

And he was at Rudy Loya's Montana Vista campaign event on Sunday with one of the Serna's. By the way, I have video from the Loya function that I will post later today.