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Texas Republicans need a runoff election to decide their nominee for state attorney general after incumbent Ken Paxton failed to secure a majority in Tuesday’s primary and a May showdown with the state attorney general. Texas Land Commissioner George P. Bush to launch DailyExpertNews projects.
Paxton led the field with four candidates by a comfortable margin, despite spirited and well-funded challenges from Bush, former Supreme Court Justice Eva Guzman and Representative Louie Gohmert.
“I think I would say clearly to the establishment: they got what they wanted,” Paxton said in a speech to supporters on Tuesday. “They got me into a run-off.”
Texas Governor Greg Abbott, a two-term incumbent president, will defeat a crowded field of GOP challengers to secure the governor’s nomination, while Beto O’Rourke, a former congressman and senate and presidential candidate, will win the Democratic nomination. win, DailyExpertNews projects.
The votes are being counted in Texas in the first midterm primaries of 2022, with contests on both sides of the aisle poised to set the scene for November elections that could sway control of Congress to Republicans.
But as the results came in, Texas shared the spotlight with President Joe Biden’s State of the Union address on Capitol Hill and the rapidly escalating crisis in Ukraine, where invading forces from Russia are invading major cities across the country.
Russian President Vladimir Putin’s troops camped on the Ukrainian border as early voting began in Texas on Feb. 14, and while the conflict seems unlikely to affect Tuesday night’s election, rapid events at home and abroad underscore the challenges. faced by candidates like the 2022. midterms start in earnest.
Tuesday’s banner contest revolved around Paxton, the incumbent two-year-old who filed a botched lawsuit to effectively nullify the 2020 election and walked under a cloud of legal trouble, with the possibility of more on the horizon. His challengers to the GOP, led by Bush and Guzman, argued he could jeopardize the GOP’s attempt to once again sweep offices across the state.
Polls ahead of Election Day showed Paxton had a commanding lead but suggested he would not secure the majority he needed to win the nomination outright.
Bush, the latest in a political dynasty that, even as the Republican Party is under the spell of former President Donald Trump, retains significant status in Texas political circles and this campaign amounted to a referendum on the future of that dynasty.
Like Bush, Guzman, who spent more than a decade on the state’s Supreme Court, is a relatively moderate. The pair clashed in a recent debate, in which Guzman questioned Bush’s qualifications and Bush denounced Guzman as a “gutter politician.” More troubling for Paxton, however, was Gohmert’s candidacy, whose ideological and geographic base overlapped with Paxton’s.
The Democratic primary for attorney general will also move to a runoff, DailyExpertNews predicted.
At the top are concerns — at least among Democrats and voting rights advocates — about the effect of the state’s restrictive new voting rules.
Texas was the first of a number of Republican-led states to hold major elections after it passed legislation, following a political wave triggered by Trump’s long campaign to cast doubt on his 2020 loss, which could affect voting. by mail and outlaws complicates other efforts to make voting more accessible. Some of the larger Texas counties have reported spikes in ballot rejections because potential voters failed to meet the stricter, and for many, confusing new identification requirements.
As polling stations closed, Harris County officials warned of delays in reporting results, due to “damaged ballots that must be duplicated,” according to a press release issued late Tuesday.
The primaries brought with them a number of polling station shortages and other problems, but Election Day itself was mostly uneventful – with the battle to resolve the unusually high number of defective ballots being the biggest challenge of this first round of voting.
The biggest problem, said Isabel Longoria, who presides over the election in populous Harris County, was that voters failed to list identification numbers on the ballot envelopes under the flap. The number of potential ballot rejections as of Monday would represent 30% of mail-in ballots submitted in the province. By contrast, less than 1% of ballots submitted — or about 8,300 statewide ballots — were rejected in the 2020 general election, according to the U.S. Election Assistance Commission.
The decade-long reclassification process has also contributed to primary nighttime uncertainty — and intrigue.
With a new congressional map designed to further reduce the number of contested seats on the map, most nominees from both parties can expect their primaries to be more fiercely contested than the contests awaiting in November. Due to the decreasing number of swing districts, there is even more attention for campaigns that play opposing sides of the parties against each other.
For Democrats, those contrasts were vividly seen in the 28th Congressional District, where Rep. Henry Cuellar, one of the most conservative Democrats still in the House, is in a tight race with Jessica Cisneros, the 28-year-old immigration attorney backed by New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, who nearly ousted him from the South Texas seat in 2020.
Cuellar’s district is a little more Democratic this time around, but the primaries appear to be even tighter – and could be headed for a runoff with neither Cuellar nor Cisneros on track to clear 50%. In a vicious spin for the left, progressive candidate Tannya Benavides seems to have siphoned enough support from Cisneros to keep the match with Cuellar close.
Cisneros got a late boost in the race when it was revealed that Cuellar is under investigation by the FBI. Cuellar has denied all wrongdoing and the details of the probe remain largely a mystery.
The signal to National Democrats of the South Texas showdown may be clearer, especially if Cuellar can overcome his legal concerns and beat Cisneros again.
Republicans, including Trump, outperformed Latino voters in the 2020 election, and Cuellar has argued that his tougher line on immigration issues, in a district that runs from the suburbs of San Antonio to the Rio Grande Valley and along the border to Laredo, is the only road for Democrats in the region. The victory for Cisneros — and, if she wins, the makeup of her coalition — will provide new insight into what the shifting margins of two years ago predict for the fall elections. But whatever the outcome, divisions in the party were evident early in the night. Cisneros’ backbone of support came from the outskirts of San Antonio, while Cuellar dominated in the border regions – a collapse that will give both flanks of the party reason to celebrate and fret.
While Cuellar’s survival rate in the 28th district has attracted most of the attention, Republicans are also closely monitoring GOP turnout in other parts of South Texas after ramping up their recruiting of candidates to run in a region that has been slated for decades. is dominated by Democrats.
Monica De La Cruz, who surprisingly ended up coming within 3 points of sending Democratic Rep. Vicente Gonzalez in 2020, will win the GOP nomination for the newly redrawn 15th district, DailyExpertNews Projects, supported by the endorsement of both Trump and Minority Group Leader Kevin McCarthy.
The overcrowded Democratic race to face De La Cruz will be decided in a second round. Afghan veteran Ruben Ramirez, a lawyer and former high school teacher supported by Gonzalez, has secured his spot on DailyExpertNews projects, but it remains unclear whether John Villarreal Rigney, a lawyer and owner of a construction company in South Texas, or Michelle Vallejo, a progressive small business owner endorsed by Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren, will join him.
Gonzalez now runs the adjacent 34th district, which became more favorable to Democrats after the realignment and where he could meet Flores if she survives her four-time GOP primary.
Despite the uncertainty surrounding the Cuellar-Cisneros race, another progressive, backed by Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez, former Austin city councilor Greg Casar is well positioned to earn the majority in the 35th district, a safe blue seat.
On the Republican side, an alleged lack of loyalty to Trump had put incumbent Representatives Van Taylor and Dan Crenshaw at risk. Taylor’s opponents in the 3rd District have attacked him for his vote to create an independent commission to investigate the January 6 uprising. The panel was rejected by Senate Republicans and effectively replaced by a select committee set up by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. But Taylor’s vote infuriated some Trump supporters, fueling opposition to him in his current race. Taylor advances to a runoff and will face DailyExpertNews Projects Keith Self in May.
Crenshaw, who ran unopposed in the 2020 GOP primaries, triumphed over multiple challengers in the 2nd district who attacked him from the right — a partial result of Texas Republicans gerrymanding the district to make it a safe red seat. Crenshaw is one of the most conservative members of the GOP conference, having been a signatory to Paxton’s 2020 election cause, but he has occasionally chatted with the former president’s closest allies, including Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, who most recently criticized her for speaking at a white nationalist conference over the weekend.
Greene and North Carolina Rep. Madison Cawthorn also opposes the GOP leadership in the race for the outgoing GOP Rep. Kevin Brady in Texas’s 8th District. Former Navy SEAL Morgan Luttrell is the National Party’s pick, but far-right opponent Christian Collins has the support of Greene, Cawthorn, Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, and Joe Arpaio, the former sheriff of Maricopa County, Arizona, who was pardoned by Trump.
This story has been updated with additional developments.