El Paso Politics

I'm attaching the voting records of the candidates so that you can get an idea of how often they vote and since so few of them really articulate more than generalities, it will also give you some insight on their part affiliation. That way you know if your voting for someone who's governing views are similar or different than your own. There are a couple of codes to explain. P and Y mean the person voted on Election Day. E means they voted early. If you see a blank space that means they either didn't vote in the election, there was no election for their district, there was a runoff but not for the party primary they voted in, or there was no election period. In the primary election areas, it will give a code of when they voted and if they voted in the Democratic or Republican primary election. In a general election you can vote for whoever you choose. But in Texas you don't register with a party, you are associated with a party based on your election history but can cha...

Seriously people, are you that stupid? Clean up your social media before any rumor about you thinking of running for office hits the streets. People are going to inevitably going to look up what you have said or posted. Look for stupid stuff before someone else finds it, screen shots it, and puts it in a mailer. Some of you geniuses get what you have coming. Seriously there are 5 different candidates with really stupid, stupid, stupid stuff floating around out there. You can't expect people to take you seriously if you're an idiot.

Here are the interviews of the District 1 candidates that were in attendance last night at the Westside Democrats candidate forum. I was unable to interview Bertha Gallardo. These are the interviews in the order they were conducted.

I was a little rushed earlier to get the post with the video up about the performances last night. But I wanted to add a few thoughts. In general, this field of candidates isn't as weird, crazy, eccentric, silly, or scary as some of the ones in the past. In general this is a pretty educated bunch of candidates and I can confidently say that the quality of candidate is much better than in years prior. No one particularly knocks me off my feet, but they aren't terrible. Thats not to say that there aren't a couple of candidates that aren't ready for prime time or that there aren't a few candidates out there with some really extremist positions, but I'll get to that in a minute. Members of the Democratic Party, pay attention when I get to that one. But DK wrote something the other day that I think was pretty spot on. Its harder for the candidates to come up with quality issues to run on. Even harder to leverage it. Sure they'll be the "but my taxes!" c...

This one will be short because there was only one candidate in attendance. A campaign staffer from Niland's camp indicated that Representative Niland was in Austin on city business and wasn't able to attend the forum. So since challenger Josh Dagda was the only one to attend I don't have any analysis or commentary since he didn't have an opponent to compare his performance to and I don't think its fair to compare his performance to the candidate in District 1 since they aren't his opponents. Dagda was asked the same questions as the candidates in District 1. Here is video of his performance. A more in-depth interview I conducted with him will be posted later today.

There were no major surprises in last night's forum sponsored by the Westside Democrats. The forum was attended by 4 of the 6 candidates for the open District 1 seat. Al Weisenberger and Rick Bonart were not in attendance. Literature left by Mr. Weisenberger at the event indicated that he was not in attendance because he was in Colorado with family on a pre-planned trip. An individual from the audience (I've never seen him at Westside Democrats events before so I don't know his name) indicated that Mr. Bonart had knee surgery earlier in the day. The event was pretty well-attended and well-run considering it was the first forum of the season. I wish they had better questions for the candidates but it was a function of the fact that there were so many races to cover. They have all the candidates who aren't speaking go into another room so that they can't hear the answers of the other candidates. I wish they had asked each candidate different questions because all a fr...