Sierra Connection Big Problem for Leaders

If you know Sierra then you know how much it bothers him that everyone is scrambling to distance themselves from him after his public bragging about electing County Judge-Elect Ricardo Samaniego.

Actually what probably bothers him more is that Samaniego contradicted the substance of what Sierra said about Escobar and went out of his way to make sure everyone knew he had no beef with Escobar.

Seriously Sierra gets denied more times than Peter denied Jesus. He's not even like a sancho a girl doesn't want her vato to find out about, he's more like a case of herpes that she denies ever having but it just won't go away.

Had the public known about Sierra's interaction with the Samaniego campaign, they never would have elected Samaniego. That is a fundamental point to understand given the razor-thin margin of victory for Samaniego. Think about it, the turnout was super-low and Sierra's involvement would've pushed people that only voted in the congressional race to go back out and vote again because they hate Sierra that much.

He absolutely hates how quickly he was dumped aside.

But nonetheless, the County Judge-Elect goes into office with this hanging over his head now.

However the impact is more widespread. According to this article in the El Paso Times, Sierra's connection to the campaign is actually something we've heard before - one of Sheriff Wiles' staffers, Chris Acosta.

Acosta has had a longstanding political relationship with Sierra going back to Oscar Leeser's election for mayor. Obviously its extremely problematic for the Sheriff to have a senior staffer doing so much political work because well, elections have consequences. Understandably word around the Democratic Party was that Wiles had a conversation with her and told her to ease up on the campaign work.

But the real question is why would she think it was smart to ever roll the dice and associate the Sheriff with Carlos Sierra, through their respective association with Acosta. Ironically Acosta is on the panel that picks people for induction into the El Paso County Democratic Party Hall of Fame, despite her willingness to open doors for a Republican operative. It just seems not worth the risk to the Sheriff for someone who hasn't won a race in a really long time.

Which brings us back to Sierra's involvement with Samaniego's race.

Bottom line here is that someone is lying. Its either Samaniego and his team, or Carlos Sierra. Either Samaniego's team is deliberately downplaying the role Sierra actually had in the campaign, or what he said was true when he bragged on Facebook when he took credit for the win.

Frankly, I think Samaneigo is probably telling what is the closest to the truth but the whole thing is suspect. Sierra was originally working with Leo Marketing until there was a falling out and Leo Marketing sent Sierra packing.

Samaniego knew Sierra's his involvement in his campaign was problematic and let him go back then. Then in the run-off when the stakes are highest someone decides to bring Sierra back in?

And Samaniego changes his story to the media. At first he denied Sierra's involvement, then admitted that he had at least a limited role with a campaign.

Changing your story to the media is not a good way to start off your terms as County Judge.

But why change your story?

Well he either just lied and thought better of it, or he didn't know.

Its possible that Acosta kept Sierra's involvement hidden from Samaniego (maybe), which makes Sierra's public pissing on the political tree even more funny.

There's a couple of other things that don't make sense about Samaniego's story about Sierra. First, Sierra usually uses Nation Builder for his data management. Samaniego said that Sierra made lists for the campaign using Voter Activation Network, or VAN.

VAN is proprietary software for the Democratic Party. If you are a Republican using VAN and the TDP finds out about it, you get your access revoked. Ask Chris Hernandez, he's been through that once before. But its also possible that Sierra was just using someone else's access, which is a no-no but hard to prove.

The point is, the more you look at this, the dirtier it starts to look.