Texas primaries 2018: Democrats are making a big play

The long-shot race for the chance to unseat Texas Republican Gov. Greg Abbott will come down to Houston businessman Andrew White, the son of former Democratic Texas Gov. Mark White; and former Dallas County Sheriff Lupe Valdez. The two will compete in the runoff for the Democratic gubernatorial nomination on Tuesday.

Some political scientists in Texas don’t mince words talking about the likelihood of a Democrat actually beating Abbott — one of the 10 most popular governors in the country, according to a Morning Consult poll conducted in January. As Rice University political science professor Mark Jones put it, “The race between Valdez and White determines who loses to Greg Abbott in November.”

Sen. Ted Cruz’s reelection campaign would really like Texas voters to know that Rep. Beto O’Rourke, the Democratic challenger hoping to turn Texas blue in November, is using a nickname, and that his birth name is Robert Francis O’Rourke.

In a statewide radio ad released almost as soon as the primary races were called, Cruz’s campaign took a shot at the legitimacy of O’Rourke’s identity. The El Paso, Texas, Democrat, who is mounting a more serious but still extremely long-shot challenge to the incumbent Republican senator, won the Democratic Texas primary Tuesday night with 61.8 percent of the vote. He still faces a very tough road ahead in a state that is trending purple but doesn’t look like it’s quite there yet.

With a few exceptions, Texas candidates who were top fundraisers were also some of the biggest losers in Tuesday night’s primaries.

In Democrats’ three biggest House races, the Seventh, 23rd, and 32nd congressional districts, a number of candidates with establishment backing and big fundraising power didn’t advance to the May 22 runoff.

The most striking thing about the much-hyped Texas primaries is how ordinary they actually were.

That was the message from the Texas Tribune’s Evan Smith, who has been following the state’s politics for the better part of three decades, when I spoke with him by phone. At the end of the day, 1.5 million Republicans voted in the primary and 1 million Democrats did. Despite the blue Texas hype and anti-Trump national environment, Republicans held a 500,000-vote advantage once all the ballots were counted.

Texas election law prevented a clear-cut outcome for many of the most heavily contested primary elections in the state on Tuesday, the start of the national primary season.

That’s because in Texas primaries, if no one candidate wins more than 50 percent of the vote, the top two vote-getters in the race then proceed to a runoff (which this year will take place on May 22). So there were two winners rather than one for nominations in several key races that will help determine control of the US House of Representatives.

Until a few weeks ago, Laura Moser was a little-known name, one of seven candidates running for the Democratic primary in Texas’s Seventh Congressional District.

That was, until the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee unleashed a scorched-earth campaign against the former freelance journalist and progressive activist, releasing an opposition memo highlighting past statements Moser made seemingly denigrating her home state.

Democrats want to chip away at Republicans’ stronghold in Texas. Tuesday’s primaries are the first test of whether the party has a shot at turning the Lone Star State a little bit bluer.

Texas’s Democratic and Republican primaries would normally be a blip on the electoral calendar. But in 2018, they’re an early bellwether for this year’s midterms. Both parties will be judging turnout to get an early, if imperfect, measure of voter enthusiasm. Democrats are banking on anti-Trump backlash and the state’s changing demographics to swing things in their favor; Republicans hope fear of that happening will fire up the base.

Our Revolution, the progressive group formed after Bernie Sanders’s presidential run in 2016, just endorsed a Democrat who found herself the subject of a Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee attack ahead of Tuesday’s Texas primary.

“The DCCC’s ridiculous attacks on Laura Moser are why Democrats nationally have lost over 1,100 seats,” said Our Revolution board member Jim Hightower in a statement announcing the endorsement. “Laura is a rising progressive advocate that the workaday people of Texas desperately need.”