Possible Development in County Judge Race

So far the race for County Judge has been very similar to the last mayoral race - an incredibly weak field of candidates. All of them are incredibly nice people, but you don't read my blog because I pull political punches, so I'm not gonna start now. The candidates are nice, but none of them are strong. And there is talk of a sitting elected official who is being urged by a lot of folks to do El Paso a solid and jump in the race. If he did, it would be an immediate impact.

First, it is looking less and less like County Commissioner David Stout is going to run for county judge because the support just isn't there. Stout is a perfect example of what happens when Max Grossman latches on to your political career. Straight-up boat anchor.

Stout needs to hustle hard to even keep his seat at this point. His opponent is former County Commissioner Sergio Lewis, who is a now a Forma candidate. And guess what? Lewis' campaign is already block walking. He hit some doors over the weekend.

So that leaves a field of Richard Samaniego, John Cook, and Laura Enriquez. Samniego is the one with all the money at this point and his consultants have made sure he's done all the political rounds. He's got name ID because of former El Paso County Sheriff, and big time anti-immigrant Leo Samaniego.

Samaniego is super likable. The one thing negative you hear about him is a pretty steady drumbeat of I really like him, but I don't like who he surrounds himself with. He's done some solid work in the community and has the most knowledge of the machinations of county government. He seems like he'd be able to go into office and work well with the other commissioners and get brought up to speed pretty quickly.

John Cook is a name a lot of you know and he has show he can win in a citywide race without having a lot of money. Knows policy pretty well, but based on the one time I saw him address commissioners court, he didn't appear to have a deep knowledge of county government and said some things that frankly didn't make any sense related to the issue he was speaking about. Twelve or so years ago when he was the upset victor in the mayoral race he walked a lot was able to pull it off. Now twelve years and a ballpark later, it isn't going to be so easy to do. Especially because he's going to have to add the areas outside of El Paso to his block walking. Its really hard to see how he gets any traction.

Laura Enriquez is my dark horse in this race. She needs to be doing a lot more in her campaign, but from what I have seen I have been impressed with her candidacy. She's an attorney and the only woman running. This ballot is going to be dominated by female candidates and despite not having as much money has the other candidates, if she can catch a break here and there she has the chance to make some noise and be a contender. Frankly, if she had a little bit of money and a solid ground game, she could win.

But you know what you don't hear about in this race at all?

Policy.

No one at all is talking about what they would do as County Judge. Probably because they don't have a clue in terms of what is going on at the county and what needs to change. The County is a strange government animal to begin with and purposely weak. So it takes a lot of savvy to fix problems at the County in a government entity that doesn't have the ability to make ordinances to deal with most of the problems that are out there.

It was out of frustration with the current field of candidates that there was ever talk of Stout running for County Judge in the first place. There has been several groups of people trying to recruit someone stronger to run for county judge since the field started to form, the most notable efforts centered around Commissioners Carlos Leon and Vince Perez.

Eventually Commissioner Leon ruled out the possibility of a bid for the county judge position. Well there are now several indications that Commissioner Vince Perez, who notably hasn't ruled it out, may be considering a run for county judge. He's been hounded for weeks by people urging him to make the run.

Perez's candidacy would immediately change the field. First, he'd be the only candidate that has a campaign team that is proven and ready to hit the ground running. He's run on basically no money before, but this time would likely have a luxury he hasn't had previously - a well financed campaign. His tenacity for campaigning is unmatched. No one can frame a message better. Perez would also be the only candidate with in-depth knowledge of county government and is the only candidate that has any track record of implementing meaningful reforms at the County.

He was elected the 2016 County Leader of the Year - a national award - for his work on judicial and budgetary reforms. There's not a candidate in the field that can touch that and there isn't a candidate in the field that would want to stand toe-to-toe with Perez on a policy debate. Ironically the only way they could try to beat Perez would be to attack the reforms he's led, which would be futile because a) he's smarter than the rest and b) the reforms were meaningful and acclaimed.

The only thing stopping Perez from running is Perez. If he chose to run he would have to resign his current seat as County Commissioner for Precinct 3. It would also leave a vacuum of people wanting to fill the seat. Everyone who has ever run for anything would likely try to through their hat in the ring and it would flip around a bunch of seats.

The salary isn't much more than what commissioners are making now and a County Judge has only one or two more additional abilities than the rest of the commissioners. Its more of an at-large seat than an executive, so why would Perez need to run for County Judge? He has already shown himself to be successful at pushing reforms through the court without doing so from the County Judge's office.

So in this last month before the filing deadline closes, watch for a lot of people to be on the edge of their seat to see what happens. Perez is likely the only potential county judge candidate that could wait until the last possible moment to throw their hat in the ring and win.