On The Record: Anthony Gutierrez

For this episode of On The Record, we speak with Anthony Gutierrez, a Regional Field Director for the Democratic National Committee and the Texas Democratic Party.

How did you get started in politics? Did you come to it in your youth or later on?

I always had an interest in politics because my parents were very much into keeping up with the news. I was a little kid watching the Iran-Contra hearings or Jesse Jackson's speech at the 1984 Democratic National Convention and thinking that was pretty normal.

But I didn't seriously consider politics as a career until after I was in college. I had already changed my major twice and still didn’t really feel like I knew what I wanted to do when I came across a book by James Carville and Mary Matalin called "All's Fair." It's about their experiences dating and eventually getting married while he worked on Bill Clinton's presidential campaign and she was working for George H.W. Bush's re-election campaign.

All the behind-the-scenes campaign stuff they talked about really struck a chord with me so I changed my major a final time to political science, graduated, went to work on my first campaign and have been doing this ever since.

What would you say are the primary issues concerning Texas?

It's a long list, but I would say the one issue that should always be at the top is education. If we get education right, everything else follows. Finding more money for our schools and our teachers will always be important.

Funding for schools is actually an area where we had a big victory during this past legislative session when State Rep. Joe Heflin got an amendment passed that effectively kept any money from being diverted out of our public schools to go towards private school vouchers.

How do state politics affect your neighborhood?

I'm pretty nomadic but when you say 'my neighborhood,’ I think of El Paso because even though I haven't lived there for years, my family is all still there. One topic that's been big at the state level for a long time and that’s recently gotten very popular at the national level is the Children's Health Insurance Program.

One would think that the health of our children would be an easy issue to find consensus on and yet here we are, in the state with more uninsured children than any in the nation, and we have our junior U.S. Senator voting against the SCHIP bill and our "Texan" President vetoing the bill.

What does that mean locally? El Paso, as was recently pointed out by my own State Senator Eliot Shapleigh, is the least insured big city in America.

What are you looking forward to in the coming cycle?

I am looking forward to: Bexar County and Nueces County going Blue again, huge General Election turnout all over South Texas, big gains in the red counties throughout the Hill Country, more great Democratic performance from the counties along the Coastal Bend and all of that combining to help us defend our incumbents, make some gains and give our statewide ticket a real shot at taking back our state.

What advice would you give to young people just getting into politics?

The best piece of advice I ever received came on my first campaign and for any young people interested in working on the campaign side of politics it could be very useful…

Just about everyone in professional politics can write really well. The number of people who are good with numbers is considerably less. Being good with numbers means being able to absorb all the data you can get your hands on - historical elections results, targeting data, polling data and everything else available. If you can take all of that, interpret it, be able to explain it all and, most importantly, be able to figure out how to most effectively utilize it…that's a very good way to make yourself absolutely indispensable to a campaign.

What one thing would you say a political organization never has enough of?

This is a very timely question. One thing the Democratic Party always needs is Precinct Chairs and it just so happens that October 4th marked the first day people could file their applications to run for Precinct Chair in the Democratic Primary.

When we talk about building and sustaining an effective Party infrastructure, what we're really talking about is recruiting and training Precinct Chairs. The TDP has information available about how to become a Precinct Chair and why the job of Precinct Chair is so important.

We undoubtedly have an opportunity to turn Texas Blue with a massive,grassroots effort, but that can’t and won’t happen without an army of vigilant, well-trained Precinct Chairs working to organize and then turn out their own neighborhoods.