Things Just Got Real in Precinct 4 County Commissioner Race

I missed this last week but someone mentioned it to me earlier today so I went to check it out for myself. Apparently the Precinct 4 County Commissioner's race is getting interesting.

Republican candidate Andrew Haggerty went on the offensive against Democratic candidate Julio Diaz in an interview conducted by Karla Mariscal of the El Paso Telemundo affiliate.

If you recall I wrote a piece awhile back about how Julio Diaz won the Democratic Primary by out-working his opponent and benefiting from the fact that she really fumbled the leveraging of a negative message against Diaz.

Apparently Andrew Haggerty learned from that mistake and at least appears to be flirting with what has the potential to be an effective negative message. It remains to be seen how its done and if there is enough time for Haggerty to leverage the message.

Here's a link to Haggerty's interview. Haggerty is asked what the biggest difference between he and Diaz is and Haggerty said business experience and trust. Haggerty alleges that Diaz has had a couple of failed business ventures. He goes on to talk about trust, which is the part that I thought was really interesting. Diaz (very wisely I might add) never really talks about issues or what he will do as commissioner. I know that bothers a lot of people, but honestly its pretty smart. But one of the few times he does get specific is when it comes to ethics.

Thats where Haggerty whacked him. Haggerty basically made the point that Diaz talks about ethics but alleges that Diaz failed to file his campaign finance reports on time (twice from what Haggety says) and further alleges that there were filed incorrectly. He also says that Diaz took two corporate contributions as well. Not major infractions by any stretch of the imagination, but I think it undermines Diaz's ethics message.

Frankly what I'm most impressed with is the fact that Haggerty did it in a Spanish-language interview. That took balls because Diaz is certainly going to have the home field advantage in that type of interview. If Haggerty is going to continue to leverage that message then it needs to be a platform more broad than Spanish media and Facebook. If the race were in the valley then I could see the Spanish-language stations being the main platform for that attack line but we are talking about a westside race.

Diaz had the advantage of being interviewed after Haggerty (click here for link to interview) but appeared to not be ready for the question. When asked by Mariscal (she wasn't specific but alluded to what Haggerty alleged) about what Haggerty said, Diaz deflected. He doesn't really address the issue at all, but his deflection wasn't terrible.

Now that I think about it, he did the best he could with that issue. There's not much room for him to explain his way out of that one.

Early voting starts soon and I think there are still a couple of debates left so it remains to be seen if this was just a flash in the pan or if this is the start of a sharper message against Diaz.