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Texas Republicans forced Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas,into a runoff on Tuesday, punishing incumbents who’d shown disloyalty to President Donald Trump. And Rep. Dan Crenshaw, a sometime Trump critic despised by MAGA commentators like Tucker Carlson, became the first GOP incumbent to lose his seat this year.
Democrats faced their own blowback from progressive voters in Texas and in North Carolina. There, Rep. Valerie Foushee was locked in a tight race with Nida Allam, a county commissioner who’d denounced her for getting funding from pro-Israel and pro-AI PACs — and who ran the year’s first ad denouncing the war in Iran.
But in Texas, where two high-profile candidates offered different — but staunchly anti-Trump — visions for the Democrats’ future, the party was on track to nominate state Rep. James Talarico to challenge the winner of Cornyn’s primary. That will be either the incumbent senator or Attorney Gen. Ken Paxton, a pro-Trump stalwart who withstood the most expensive ad campaign ever run to help a GOP senator.
Rep. Jasmine Crockett, whose slashing, “receipts”-waving rhetorical style made her an early frontrunner, trailed Talarico but had not conceded the race as of early Wednesday. Democrats had sued to keep polls in Dallas County, her stronghold, open longer after voter confusion about reorganized polling sites. Paxton intervened to prevent that.
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In both states, Democrats with some conservative views met furious voters. How furious? It depended on how many conservative Latinos showed up at the polls.
Rep. Henry Cuellar, a Laredo moderate who’d voted with Republicans on anti-transgender school sports bills and got a helpful pardon from Trump, won more narrowly than expected over a more liberal Democrat. Rep. Vicente Gonzalez, a scandal-free colleague with similar votes, gave up a third of the vote to a challenger; Bobby Pulido, a Tejano singer with some anti-abortion views, ran a little stronger to beat a progressive candidate endorsed by Crockett. (Talarico campaigned with Pulido.)
Egged on by the president, Republicans had redrawn congressional boundaries in Texas and North Carolina. That shrunk the territory Democrats could win, and put some of their incumbents on new red turf.
The new lines punished Houston Rep. Al Green, a Trump impeachment advocate who was trailing freshman Rep. Christian Menefee — less than half his age. Menefee led in the early count; he’d been helped by the crypto industry PAC Fairshake, which Green denounced in the final days of their race. In Dallas, former Rep. Colin Allred led Rep. Julie Johnson in a comeback bid for the seat he gave up to run against Sen. Ted Cruz two years ago. It was unclear, on Tuesday, if any of them could clear the 50% threshold and avoid a runoff.
Those results had more to do with candidate name ID and demographics than with ideology. Allred had confounded some of his old colleagues by cutting a pre-primary endorsement of Crockett, saying that he believed an influencer’s accusation that Talarico called him a “mediocre Black man,” which Talarico denied.
But Crockett carried the district, and her endorsement helped her pastor, a Justice Democrats-endorsed progressive named Frederick Haynes, win in the seat she abandoned for her Senate bid. Progressives won some safe seats in North Carolina, too, ousting three Democrats who’d voted with Republicans to override their governor’s veto of conservative bills targeting transgender rights and spurring cooperation with ICE.
In GOP contests, there was only one issue: Were you with Trump, or had you betrayed him?
Crenshaw, whose seat was redrawn to include new conservative precincts, lost handily to state Sen. Steve Toth; Trump never endorsed Crenshaw. Cruz endorsed Toth, while also backing his former chief of staff, Rep. Chip Roy, for state attorney general. Trump had endorsed Rep. Tony Gonzales, who narrowly beat a gun rights influencer in his 2024 race, and spent. On a Friday trip to Corpus Christi, he pointedly didn’t repeat on the endorsement.
With most of the vote counted, Roy trailed state Rep. Mayes Middleton, who ran against the congressman by accusing him of being a fair-weather conservative who hadn’t fought hard enough for Trump when he challenged the 2020 election. Paxton’s preferred AG candidate trailed both Middleton and Roy in the primary.
But Paxton’s wing of the party made gains in 2024, beating some of the Republicans who’d voted to impeach him over a long-running scandal. Gonzales trailed in his rematch with gun rights activist Brandon Herrera.
In every state with a March 3 primary, Democrats hoped that the GOP’s total commitment to Trump would eventually backfire — not now, but by November. They drew some hope from Arkansas, which held the day’s only special election, for a state legislative seat outside Little Rock. Democrat Alex Holladay won a Republican-held legislative seat that he’d lost in 2024, by a lopsided margin.
David’s view
It was a good night for candidates who’d aligned themselves with MAGA — pre-Iran War MAGA, anyway. It was a mess for Kamala Harris. She took a risk by endorsing Crockett, a friend from Congress who became a campaign co-chair. Beltway Democrats who don’t want Harris to play a major role in the party (that’s most of them, whatever they say in public) were happy to watch her flop there.