What Went Down At Biden’s State Of The Union And Texas’s Primary Election

That’s a great question, Nathaniel … but it’s honestly hard to tell? Cuellar so far has campaigned as a moderate with more experience, but Cisneros has the backing of congressional progressives, like New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Sen. Bernie Sanders. If Cisneros sticks to focusing her campaign on local issues impacting the district versus national ones that typically animate the progressive base (but not necessarily Hispanic voters), she could stand a chance of winning in November?

With a D+7 partisan lean, Texas’s 28th District could be competitive this November, especially if a red wave develops. I know some Democrats are worried that the progressive Cisneros would be less electable than the more moderate Cuellar, but now that Cuellar is under federal investigation, I’m not so sure (our research has shown that scandals typically cost candidates several percentage points). Who do you all think would be the stronger candidate for Democrats at this point?

Another Big Lie race to keep an eye on is Texas’s 15th District. A little background: In 2020, Democratic Rep. Vicente Gonzalez narrowly beat his Republican challenger, Monica De La Cruz, in what had long been a Democratic stronghold in the south of the state. Gonzalez won with just 6,588 more votes than De La Cruz. When state Republicans redrew the 15th District during the redistricting process last year to make it more competitive, Gonzalez decided to run in the safer 34th Congressional District instead. But De La Cruz is sticking with the 15th, and she’s performing well in tonight’s GOP primary, with 57.4 percent of the vote, according to the New York Times (the Democratic race, meanwhile, will likely go to a run off). De La Cruz has embraced the Big Lie, claiming that mail-in ballots provided opportunities for fraud and questioned her loss in 2020.