The home stretch for interviews

Barring anything unusual, I’ve done all of the Harris County interviews I’m going to do at this point. You can see who I’ve spoken to and listen to them all on the Harris County primary page. You may have noticed that there’s still a couple of weeks till early voting, and you might be wondering what I’ve got left to bridge the gap till then. The answer is that I’m working on interviewing candidates in the multitude of contested Congressional primaries. This post is one part what to expect and one part request for help.

I don’t know how many of these candidates I’m going to be able to interview. Unlike Harris County, I don’t have connections to a lot of these people, so it’s harder to get things set up. For the same reason, I’m not going to be able to group interviews by race very much. I’m going to try to reach more than one candidate for each race where I talk to someone, but there are no guarantees. So with all that said, here’s how things look as of this morning:

Candidates I have already interviewed – These will run in some order over the next two weeks:

Rep. Silvestre Reyes, CD16
Pete Gallego, CD23
Ciro Rodriguez, CD23
Marc Veasey, CD33
Ramiro Garza, CD34
Anthony Troiani, CD34

Candidates with whom I have made contact, but do not yet have scheduled – I hope to get them all on the calendar soon, but I need to get a suggestion of what dates would work for them first:

Beto O’Rourke, CD16
Joaquin Castro, CD20
Domingo Garcia, CD33
Sylvia Romo, CD35

Candidates I have sent email to but have not heard back from – In my copious spare time, I will try to phone them if I can find a phone number on their website:

Armando Villalobos, CD34
Filemon Vela, CD34
Rep. Lloyd Doggett, CD35

Candidates I would like to talk to but have not yet contacted – The road to hell is very nicely paved, I must say:

Rep. Ruben Hinojosa, CD15
Ronnie MacDonald, CD27
Rep. Eddie Berniece Johnson, CD30
Barbara Mallory Caraway, CD30
Taj Clayton, CD30
Kathleen Hicks, CD33
Steve Salazar, CD33

That last list could grow depending on how industrious and/or delusional I get. This is where you come in. My preferred modus operandi for contacting a campaign is to find someone who knows someone and ideally get an introduction or at least a name and a responsive phone number or email address. What I like to avoid where possible is cold calling or sending email to a generic email address. I presume, or at least I hope, that my readership includes people who are with or know someone who is with these campaigns, and I’m including the penultimate group as well as the last one. If you are one of these people, I would greatly appreciate it if you would contact me and let me know so I can take advantage of your connections. You can email me – kuff at offthekuff dot com – you can send me a message via Facebook, or you can leave a comment on this post and tell me how to reach you. If all I ever publish are the six interviews I’ve already done, I’ll still feel pretty good about my accomplishment, and I’ll work on tracking down the stragglers at the TDP convention in June. Needless to say, I’d like to do more before the primary. So please help me if you can, and we’ll all be the better for it. Thanks very much.

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5 Responses to The home stretch for interviews

  1. Paul Kubosh says:

    I think you should consider covering some of the Republican Politics. You would add good commentary to the party.

  2. Burt Levine says:

    Kuff-I know you won’t agree with Paul and I on this but nonetheless your input in the GOP races would be appreciated. They are likely to have an impact county-wide and yes, it would be good for your readers and you to know about them as much as it saddens me to no end that those who follow GOP politics do not know much about Democratic Party candidates. Please consider this because nothing was more strking or sad to me in the 2010 elections than Democrats not knowing about Republicans and Republicans not able to know about Democrats.

  3. Guys, I appreciate the sentiment, but outside of the Harris County DA race I have a hard time imagining that a Republican candidate would think it an asset to be interviewed by the likes of me for a primary. I’ve been quoted in Republican attack mailers in the past. I don’t see what the upside for any of them would be.

  4. Paul Kubosh says:

    I hear you. The local republican party has problems. I am just a little upset with all the “leaders” of the party. I could go on and on. Hotze endorsed Adams for J.P. for heavans sake. All because he hired blakemore as a consultant. I am so disappointed. That doesn’t mean I have any faith in the democrats. You are a straight shooter and force people to deal with uncomfortable questions. Myself included. Keep on punching.

  5. Pingback: Interview with Rep. Silvestre Reyes – Off the Kuff

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