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This episode was recorded Nov. 5, 2026.
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Diego Mendoza-Moyers: Today: There was an election this week, and it could usher in change at virtually all levels of government in El Paso.
Beyond the high-profile Texas races in which Democrat James Talarico won a U.S. Senate seat and Gina Hinojosa upset Greg Abbott in the governor’s race, there were impactful races at the local level here in El Paso.
County Judge Ricardo Samaniego held his seat and two new commissioners will take office in January on the five-seat County Commissioners Court. On City Council, Far East Side Representative Ivan Niño fended off a challenger, but three other seats will go to a runoff election in mid-December because none of the candidates in those races secured over 50% of the vote.
Plus, El Paso voters reelected three of the city’s state representatives to the Texas House, which also shifted to become majority Democratic after longtime Republican dominance. I’m Diego Mendoza Moyers, a reporter with El Paso Matters. And, in a minute, I’ll talk with senior reporter Elida Perez about the races in El Paso and the impact the results could have on local government in our city.
Before I speak with Elida, this El Paso Matters Podcast episode is brought to you by our podcast title sponsor, Tawney, Acosta and Chaparro, truck crash and injury attorneys. Their team of local, seasoned trial attorneys are ready to help if you’ve been injured in a crash.
Also, you can subscribe to the El Paso Matters Podcast on YouTube or read our free reporting at elpasomatters.org. And many thanks to El Paso Community College Valle Verde Campus for the use of their studio podcast space.
Now, on to the show.
Elida, thank you for joining me. Always good to chat city issues with you.
Elida Perez: Thanks for having me.
Diego: So, like I said, there was an election this week. Listeners might have heard. And I guess we’ll just start, I kind of want to do a run through of a lot of the local races, but we’ll start here with County Judge Ricardo Samaniego. He was just elected to his third term. Just curious what you can tell us about that race, what he said on election night? I think you talked to him and his opponent. And, yeah, just any thoughts you had on that race to start?
Elida: Yeah. So, I think based on what I heard from Judge Samaniego on election night at his watch party, even he had been a little nervous about how early voting results were going to go. He was really excited to go into the third term and have won the election outright.
At early voting, he had at least 70% of the votes. So, there was no way that Minerva Torres-Shelton was going to recover from that. I mean, just mathematically impossible, right?
Diego: Yeah, there wasn’t a lot of drama. And we should say that he won, ultimately, with about 69% of the vote.
Elida: I see. Yeah, so, small shift, right? But he admitted that he was a little worried at first. But going into his third term, he did talk about things like – and, mind you, it was a very lively viewing party there at the Andale Mexican restaurant on Gateway East. There was a lot of folks there, including Sheriff (Oscar) Ugarte and other supporters and whatnot. There was a lot of booze flying around. But, hey, I mean, it’s a celebration, right?
ELECTION RESULTS: El Paso sets voting record; Democrats sweep local, state races
Diego: You wouldn’t blame Democrats for celebrating with the results of that night, I guess.
Elida: Right, It was a very — yeah, it was a very charged night for Democrats.
So, some of the things that he talked about with me, when I went to drop in and see how things were going, he brought up an interesting point that, with this third term, it’ll really give him the opportunity to shift focus from being what he called the crisis county judge to trying to focus more on some more development type stuff or more entertainment type things. Trying to expand on the film industry. The county’s gotten some agreements with some films that wanted to come and produce in the Downtown area and sign things with the county to cooperate. on that kind of thing.
So, things like that. Whereas, in his first two terms, if you think about it, there was the COVID-19 pandemic. That was a really trying time for everybody all around, government as well. Then we had the mass immigrant influxes throughout that time. The Walmart mass shooting also occurred during those first terms. So it sounded like he was looking forward to maybe being able to move past crisis mode and look into more — I don’t want to say fun stuff, but —
Diego: Be a little more proactive as opposed to reacting to disasters or whatever? I don’t say that as a negative way, but just kind of dealing with these things that sort of show up in El Paso. That’s an interesting comment that he made.
And Minerva Torres Shelton, we’ve seen her run for other offices before. Did she say anything about her loss when you talked to her?
Elida: I did talk to her. She previously ran for county sheriff and Oscar Ugarte won that one outright. So, then she tried to run for county judge. When I spoke with her Tuesday night, she — I asked her because I think it’s a fair question, “Are you going to run for a different kind of office or what do you do from here?” And she said, “No.” She said she wasn’t going to run for another elected office. She tried twice and, so, I think she’s moving on.
But she did not say what the next move is. So, she did say there was something she had lined up. but was not quite ready to share that publicly. So, I think that’s an interesting teaser, if you will, on where she goes next. She had a — she was running her campaign. She didn’t raise a ton of money. She did get some donations and this and that, but she was largely utilizing social media platforms and this and that. But I think at the end of the day, the Democrat majority voters just showed up in full force.
Diego: It’s almost like there were sort of these broader trends that would have made it challenging for, I think, any Republican at the local level in these partisan races. But, yeah, just interesting that she — we’ll be curious to see going forward if she still kind of plays a role in Republican politics in El Paso — former law enforcement officer.
So, we’re going to have Samaniego retained as our county judge, which I’ll remind listeners is like the mayor of the county, essentially, right?
But, so, there’s the five-member county commissioners court, which includes Samaniego. And, so, we’re going to have two new members on there, replacing some commissioners that served for a while, in David Stout and Sergio Coronado. Replacing them will be Miguel Teran and Annette Griego.
And we should just say, I mean, they both — Griego won with 65% of the vote and Miguel Teran had almost 77%. So, I think there again, really evidence of just the kind of Democratic landslide that took place. But did you have any thoughts on those races or I just wonder, I mean, I guess we could see the composition of commissioners court change, it may be too early to say sort of what their policy priorities will be. But just curious if you had any thoughts on the commissioners court makeup now?
Elida: Yeah, anytime you have in essence, with such a small group of elected officials, it’s two brand new members of the court. Annette Griego has her professional experience as a nurse practitioner. Teran has his experience as a construction project manager, that sort of background.
So, it’ll be interesting to see how they adapt to the public office. They’re both political newcomers. They don’t have experience in public service. And anytime you see that shift occur, it will be a kind of a wait and see, unfortunately. And, so, I mean, we don’t know if they’ll come in and want to immediately try to start pitch changes or be really firm on certain stances. It’s just, I think it’s a little too early to tell. But it’ll be interesting to watch and see if their energies kind of jive with the flow or if it brings just an entirely different dynamic to the commissioners court.
What I’ve seen lately on commissioners court is both David Stout and Sergio Coronado have been a little more outspoken on certain things. I think because their terms are coming to an end, they’ve at times been a little combative on certain topics. So, it’ll be interesting to see how they step into the role, whether they’re going to come out and be very vocal at first or if they’ll kind of just quietly watch the first couple of months or so. It’s kind of when the we had a majority new City Council over that last election, the first couple months, things were kind of quiet, not a whole lot of discussion going on. So, it’ll be interesting to see how this plays out with these two new commissioners.
Diego: And I do think we see that learning curve being a thing that, sometimes it seems like it takes several months, if not years, sometimes, for elected officials new to the gig, new to politics, to get their feet underneath them. I know — I believe Teran on the campaign trail was talking about trying to do things like somehow freeze home valuations for property tax purposes, right, to sort of avoid the increase. I don’t think that’s really within the county’s purview. And, so, you’ll just have to see sort of how, maybe, sophisticated or knowledgeable these candidates are about what’s in their purview and what’s in their power and things like that. So that’ll be interesting.
But yeah, I appreciate the, kind of, the commentary there on the county.
So, moving over to the city, I think we had four races and only one of them was won outright. So, we’ll have some runoff elections. I believe December 12th is the runoff election date next month. And, so, obviously I think we usually see a pretty large depression in turnout or reduction in turnout. So, that’s going to be something that I’m curious if you have any thoughts on.
But just to get into it race by race, I mean, we had Ivan Niño, the representative for District 5, which is entirely east of Joe Battle, right? Very new, high growth area. He faced a guy named Richard Genera, who was — I don’t think Richard had plans to run for council entering 2026 or even, like, six months ago.
READ MORE: 3 of 4 El Paso City Council incumbents seeking reelection forced into runoff
I interviewed him. I think he was kind of called to run a couple of weeks before the deadline just a few months ago because he felt like Ivan Niño didn’t do such a superb job in his first two years on council to deserve to run unopposed. And, so, it was just interesting to see. Richard ran kind of a shoestring operation, right? And I think he got, like, 31% of the vote or something like that, around there 30%, 31%. And, so, that was just an interesting race. But I think Ivan Niño had such a fundraising advantage, just kind of overwhelming for one opponent.
But, I guess before I get into any other races, curious if you had any specific highlights or takes on any of the races that we saw this last Tuesday?
Elida: Yeah. So, with the City Council, it’ll be really interesting to how the opponents of the incumbents handle this runoff election. It is going to be mid-December, right in the middle of the holidays. People, I think, are going to be a little more checked out. Because the November election was just so overwhelming, right? On either way you look at it, it was just such a big election that voters may be checked out. But they’ll need to be reminded, like, “Oh, don’t forget, we still need you to come back and hit the polls because these three people need to be — these three seats need to be elected.” We’re still not done.
So, those challengers are really going to have to go out of their way to really hit the streets. They’re going to pull out all the stops, if there’s any final fundraising they can do to really just get their names out there.
Because I think that what I foresee could happen in the runoff is that if these challengers don’t make very strong cases for themselves, it’s very likely that the incumbents are going to get reelected. And I say that because when we look at the voting results for election night, the incumbents did have pretty decent leads over the challengers that finally ended up making it to the runoff.
And that may translate on runoff election day, just by the mere fact that people may be more familiar with them or if their opponents don’t make a very strong case for themselves, then it’s going to be very difficult for them to push through.
Diego: Yeah, I think you’re right. Like, this was such a monumental election in the eyes of so many people and had this really transformative result, right? However you feel about it. And, so, I do think there could be some sort of fatigue or indifference, right? About, oh, like, “What do you mean we have to vote again?” Right?
And I’ll say I think that was an interesting dynamic with Ivan Nino’s race against Richard Genera. You saw how just having one opponent like that when the other races there’s three or four or five candidates and so they’re kind of siphoning out votes. So, it was interesting Niño was so decisive.
But then another race that I covered myself was incumbent Art Fierro in District 6, which is also a Far EastSide district, a little bit further south of District 5. And, so, Art Fierro, he served in the Texas House, a pretty well-known name. He got about 34% of the vote. He’ll be going to a run-off against Jesse Moreno, who was formerly a city council staffer for Cassandra Hernandez, as well as Deanna Maldonado-Rocha.
And, so, that’s going to be an interesting race to watch because you’ve got Fierro with — he’s got a huge fundraising advantage. He brought in quite a bit of money. But I think, Moreno, he’s got — he’s a sharp guy. He knows all of the ins and outs of city government. And, so, I think that’s kind of an advantage. I think when you see some of these challengers come in, maybe they don’t know all the parliamentary rules and sort of the powers of the city and the processes and how these things work.
So, I think that’ll be an interesting race between Fierro, longtime incumbent, name recognition, a lot of money. This guy, Jesse Moreno, really sharp on city issues. I think he says the things that are interesting to people. He’s talking about lowering utility bills. He has a lot of knowledge of how that works and the Public Utility Commission, things like that. So, that’s going to be an interesting race. And, again, Moreno garnered about 27% of the vote in that one versus 34% to Fierro, to your point of the incumbents did have a pretty solid advantage.
Elida: Well, and former City Council staffers don’t necessarily do badly. I mean, Chris Canales was a former staffer. They do come in with a certain level of knowledge on how the city functions and do have that little edge. And there’s no saying that he’s not going to give the incumbent Art Fierro a run for his money. What I do think is they’re going to have to work really hard.
Diego: Yeah, I think that’s right. And Moreno brought in some money, but certainly at a fundraising disadvantage with Art Fierro. We should also mention Jesse Moreno is 25-years-old, I think. And, so, that would be an interesting change in composition in terms of age and just the sort of dynamics there if (he does) oust Art Fierro. And I did want to mention too, in that race, there was about 21,000 people that voted in District 6 in that city council race. So what are we going to see in the runoff, right? Is it going to be 5,000, 10,000, 2,000 maybe? I’ll be surprised if we see 20,000.
SEE ALSO: El Paso voter registration deadline for City Council runoff nears
Elida: It’s going to be one of those — I mean, these runoffs, these December runoffs, it’s going to be one of those where literally every single vote is going to count. And these are those kinds of elections where sometimes people may get disengaged and they’re like “It’s not going to matter, my vote, if I don’t show up. It’s not going to change anything.” But because so few people come out, I mean, it really does move the needle.
Diego: Yeah, every vote’s got a lot more weight.
Elida: Yeah, and if you look at, for example, Alejandra Chávez, who had multiple opponents in District 1 on the Westside, right? So, it was interesting to see how close It was between Sam Armijo and Matthew James Kozick to get that spot for the runoff.
Diego: Yeah, a difference of about 65 votes out of 25,000 cast. Really small margin there.
Elida: Yeah.
Diego: Well, so let’s shift over and talk about the District 1 race you’re referring to. And I should mention, so Alejandra Chávez, as well as Ivan Niño, they both entered council two years ago. Typically, they serve a four-year term. They ran for those seats because the predecessors both ran for mayor, right? Brian Kennedy ran for mayor in District 1 in 2024, and then Isabel Salcido on the Far East Side also ran for mayor. So, Nino and Chavez sort of stepped up, and so they’ve served two years. I think this was kind of their chance of like, “Hey, voters, give me a full four year term to see what I can do,” right? So just an interesting similarity between Alejandra Chavez and Ivan Nino. Those two seats were filling the vacancies after those prior representatives resigned to run for mayor.
Yeah.
Diego: So, to their credit, I mean, they only had two years to sort of make an impact to the voters. And so they’re both — Ale Chávez got about 47% of the vote. So, she came just shy of escaping the runoff. But, so, let’s talk about her opponent. She is going to face now Sam Armijo, kind of a more conservative candidate right? In his late 80s. Chávez, I think, is in maybe her 50s or late 40s.
Elida: Actually, we’re the same age. We’re both 48. I just came to realize that when I was doing the reporting on that race.
A young 48.
Diego: Amen. Hey, I’m, yeah — I feel you there. So, just talk about that race. Do you have any thoughts on the District 1 race, the Westside, Ale Chávez’ time on council so far? What are you thinking about that race?
Elida: Yeah, it’ll be interesting. I mean, I think she has an advantage by being the incumbent, Latina female and —
Diego: The mayor pro tem, right? The mayor pro tem has a leadership role in council.
Elida: I think some of the things that may work against her are her voting history. She supported Meta. Well, let me rephrase that. She didn’t vote against getting rid of the Meta incentive deal. So, I mean, she’s made amendments here and there. But, at the same time, if an anti-incumbent sentiment creeps up, then Armijo may have an opportunity.
But he also has — he declined an interview, in essence, with El Paso Matters because we wouldn’t send him e-mail questions. So, we never actually talked with him to be able to say, “Hey, what are you about? What are your goals and whatnot?” He has proposed this budget cut that could save millions of dollars, but some of the things within those proposals are not actionable. Like, you can’t take money from here to put in the general fund by law. So, I mean, it’s a little tricky.
Diego: And we should say, again, Sam Armijo in his late 80s, I just want to emphasize that. Credit to him for having the vigor and energy to run. I think he was very successful with General Electric, had a long career, but in his late 80s. And he also put quite a bit of his own money in this race. I mean, he had billboards, he had quite a bit of …
Elida: Yeah, I saw his commercials and whatnot. He had flyers going out and all that. So, even though Alejandra Chávez was only there for two years, maybe she’s got that name recognition working for her.
Diego: Well, maybe. I interviewed Sam Armijo the last time he ran against Ale Chávez two years ago. And he’s certainly, I would say, a more conservative candidate, whether, hey, maybe people want that. He’s not real concerned about climate change or environmental issues. He seemed to think that the parks are unsafe and that crime is rampant and sort of that mentality. So, just to give a window into sort of his philosophy or thinking politically.
But, Ale Chávez, I think my perception of her has been she’s very focused on issues in her district, right? Like, let’s get the Resler extension, let’s do these road projects, let’s make sure there’s — I think they’re building a school where people were worried about traffic. And, so, she’s been focused on these very local issues. I think at times there’s been some conflict with the other members on council. Not everybody gets along, that’s fine. But I think she’s been — had some squabbles with people maybe.
And just the other day, there was this issue of the downtown buildings crumbling, right, and injuring people. And, so, she introduced an item to address that. And I think Chris Canales, who represents the area, maybe took umbrage with that.
So, anyways, voters can have their own perspectives on it, but I think that’s been what I’ve observed: maybe a little bit of conflict as well as a focus on her district on local infrastructure issues and things like that.
Elida: Yeah, definitely some of that. This council has definitely had their moments of tension and discord, if you will. I wouldn’t say anything too extreme. Things haven’t been flying across the dais or anything, but there’s definitely been some conflict. And introducing items that specifically affect somebody else’s district is something that I really hadn’t seen before this year. It happened earlier this year and I can’t remember the specific item, but somebody introduced something that would have impacted a different district. And it’s kind of set this weird precedent because even Representative Canales brought that up during the downtown inspections discussion. Like, you know, I’m not sure why or at least did you talk to any stakeholders at all? And it was actually Representative Limón that vocalized her concern and issue with it.
Diego: Which isn’t the first time Limón and Chávez have maybe had some disagreements on the dais.
Elida: Yeah, they can kind of get at each other here and there.
Diego: I should say, too, about her opponent, and we’ll move on to the next race after this, but Armijo also, to his credit, like, he’s very much a sort of “Lower property taxes, cut spending in the immediate term, where our taxes are too high, we’ve got to lower them.” So, I would say that’s his focus, (he is) completely against the deck park, things like that.
I think Chávez is maybe a little more open to the deck park, a little more institutional in thinking of “We’ve got to have economic growth as opposed to just cutting our way to tax cuts.” So, yeah, that’ll be an interesting race.
And just to see what the composition is, again, I think over 25,000 people voted in that race. So, I’ll be real curious to see what the turnout is for the runoff election next month.
So, let’s shift to District 8 and we’ll close here shortly. But, again, Chris Canales, the incumbent, he just completed his first four-year term. I think he was a City Council staffer before that. We actually went to high school together. So, yeah, he’s clearly like got some …
Elida: We see our age differences here.
Diego: So, he’s clearly got, like, some institutional knowledge and I think most people would agree he’s pretty well-prepared on the dais. He speaks for all 10 of his minutes, right?
Elida: He does his research.
Diego: And I think that’s kind of been, I think, his MO is, like, “Let me be the kind of the bookworm up here on the dais.”
So, he’ll be facing in the runoff Matthew Guzman. Canales got about 34% of the vote. Guzman won about 25%.
Guzman, I first became aware of him because he was very adamantly in favor of the deck park project, would call into City Council speak in favor of it. And, so, I don’t know the extent to which that led him to running, that issue. But that’s how I became aware of him, for being very much an advocate of the deck plaza.
Which I think is one contrast with Canales, who has sort of tacitly supported the deck plaza, but he’s also kind of spoken against it. Guzman’s a huge supporter of it. That’s not his only platform, but that’s I think one big distinction because I think otherwise like they’re both kind of young guys, pretty sharp, pretty progressive, I think you could say. But I think one big difference is the Deck Plaza.
But, just curious, any thoughts you had on the District 8 run and what to think about going forward?
Elida: Yeah, well, Chris Canales, it’s like you said, he’s always very prepared. He’s been outspoken against certain things over the last year, like the use of flock cameras.
Diego: Meta as well. He voted to terminate the incentive agreement with Meta.
Elida: Right. So, he’s kind of on that end of the spectrum. And it’s interesting because in this race, you’ve seen that PAC, the PAC advertisements.
Diego: That we don’t know who funded it.
Elida: Right. Your dark money PACs targeting Chris and all this because of his lack of support for Meta.
Diego: We haven’t confirmed that Meta funded those ads. But there’s certain breadcrumbs that would suggest maybe they, it was a lot of money spent, no donors revealed, the people associated with it have been in favor of the data center. So, draw your own conclusions.
Elida: Yeah. And, so, it’ll be interesting to see whether that resonates with any of the voters coming into the runoff election.
I do think that they’re both focused on the urban core. Guzman lives in Sunset Heights, he talks about that. So, I think that they’re both focused on, like, “Let’s bring redevelopment to the core. Let’s support renovating old buildings and sort of avoiding the urban sprawl that we see and kind of bringing people back to the core.”
I think they’ve got some of those similar attitudes. I mean, Chris Canales, it seems like he’s drawn the ire of some of the big business people in town and maybe, I think Guzman is, he’s well-funded. I think he’s brought in money from the big business interests in town. Not to tell you that’s a bad thing, right? But I think that’s kind of the trends we’ve seen.
I know also Chris Canales faced a recall campaign because he supported an affordable housing complex right behind the sort of the Best Buy, Ulta stores there on Sunland Park. It was a housing authority project and, so, some of the residents there got just incredibly angry about that, so he faced a recall over that.
But, yeah, I think that there’s not a huge division between these two. I think they would both probably perform, maybe, similarly on council, kind of being a progressive sort of young, urban core-focused kind of representative. But maybe I’m wrong.
Elida: Yeah, it’ll be interesting to see how that one plays out because, if you look at them at face value, two young educated guys, you could argue that if the PACs have their way and they get into the heads of voters with this “Canales is bad” and whatnot, then that could play a role in the outcome.
But again, he’s got the recognition. He’s got a pretty good reputation on council. He has done his full first term. He’s advocated for a lot. So, again, Matthew Guzman, as well as Jesse Moreno, Sam Armijo, they’re all going to have to really put on their game faces.
Diego: Yeah. And we should say about Matthew Guzman, as it relates to the dark money attack ads on Chris Canales that also spoke in favor of Matthew Guzman, he actually disavowed that and said, like, “Whoever is funding this, this isn’t helping me.”
If anything, it probably makes Guzman look worse, in the eyes of any voters, having this sort of dark money supporter. So, I just want to make that note Guzman did say, “Please stop. This isn’t helping me. I don’t advocate for this.”
Elida: Yeah, he’s washing his hands of it.
Diego: Yeah, exactly.
So, just another couple of quick notes here. Well, I guess I did just want to make one interesting note just on the topic of data centers. Again, maybe that’s one area where Canales and Guzman might have some different, there might be some space between them or some separation is that Canales is clearly more antagonistic or pessimistic about Meta and its data center project. I haven’t heard Guzman really speak negatively of it.
And I just want to make a note, too, just on the topic of data centers. So, we won’t get too in this, but just across the state line in New Mexico, Doña Ana County, they’ve got Project Jupiter underway, a massive data center project, probably bigger even than Meta’s here in El Paso, very close to us, going to have a big impact.
And a county commissioner that won out there was Daisy Maldonado, whose entire platform was premised on opposing Project Jupiter. And she was kind of a community organizer organizing against it. And, so, I just wanted to throw that out there. Like, we could see at the local level, maybe local officials both in El Paso and in the counties, that are not as friendly to these data centers, that aren’t as oppositional and could try to throw a wrench into things. That was an interesting thing that we saw this very passionate anti-data center advocate take office over there.
Elida: Yeah, we’ll see if any of these challengers kind of try to take a page out of that book.
Diego: Yeah. It seems like there’s sort of more hurdles in the way for Project Jupiter. Meta is just gliding through. And I’ll say this, too, I mean, Oracle’s been trying to grease everybody up with tons of money. They talked about giving $55 million annually in utility bill credits. We’ve not heard that level of generosity from Meta, at least publicly.
Elida: So, I think people are trying to apply for community grants and whatnot through Meta, but I don’t know that it’s at the same level that Project Jupiter is.
Diego: Oracle is talking about knocking $40 off of the average utility ratepayer’s bill monthly for three years, so pretty significant.
But anyways, we’ll wrap up here, Elida. Just looking at the election as a whole, just wonder if you have any takeaways? Any kind of high-level thoughts after we see this? Obviously, we’ve still got the runoffs to come. We’ve seen the other, the partisan races all went blue. What do you think going forward? Was the incumbent anger as intense as you thought? What did you think about it?
Elida: Apparently not at all. I mean, you can see with the county judge race that was not even a factor. Samaniego easily stayed in his position. We were going to see change with the county commissioners either way.
So, I think whatever had occurred in that March primary, the dust had settled, if you will, and people were more aligned with their party votes as far as the county commissioners races went.
Now, with the city council races, I think had there not been such a crowded field in the ones where we’re going to see the runoffs, they may have outright won their races. But when you have multiple candidates, it’s basically inevitable that there will be these runoff elections.
Diego: Yeah, kind of siphoning votes off from each other.
Elida: So, it’ll be interesting to see how it plays out. I think that incumbents are probably going to do well just by the nature of the name recognition, the timing of the runoff, just being mid-holiday season, people kind of checking out a bit. So, as I said, I do believe that if any of these challengers stand a chance, they really have to step up their game and make their voices heard. They’ve got to do a lot of legwork and really convince voters that what they are proposing, what they want to see happen in these districts is better than what is occurring now with the incumbents.
Diego: Yeah, I guess they’ll have to campaign for another month plus, which sounds like tons of fun. But I guess we’ll wrap up there, Elida. Maybe after mid-December, we’ll have you come back on before Christmas and we’ll talk about the new composition of city council. But, anyways, just appreciate your time kind of talking about this stuff and lots of elections, lots of things to keep an eye on going forward. So, appreciate your time.
Elida: Yeah, we do a lot of work going into the elections and never quite end because we’re always keeping track of what’s going on after and then once they get into office.
Diego: And then there will be another election before we know it.
Elida: Yeah, it’s a never-ending, necessary evil.
Diego: Yep, cool. Thanks for your time, Elida.
Elida: Thanks for having me.
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