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

One potentially endangered GOP incumbent we’ve been monitoring is Rep. Van Taylor, who has come under fire from the right for voting to certify the 2020 election results and backing the establishment of a bipartisan commission to investigate the Jan. 6 assault on the U.S. Capitol. As things stand, he could just squeak out an outright win in the primary in the 3rd District — or end up in a runoff by the narrowest of margins. Right now, Taylor has 51 percent with about 92 percent reporting, according to the AP. Should he end up with just shy of a majority, it looks like former Collin County Judge Keith Self, sitting at 26 percent, would advance to face him.

For all the action in the GOP primary for attorney general — incumbent Ken Paxton will likely advance to a runoff, but it’s unclear against whom — the Democratic race may also be headed toward a runoff. There, former ACLU attorney Rochelle Garza leads with 42 percent, while former Galveston Mayor Joe Jaworski has a slight edge over attorney Lee Merritt for the second spot, 21 percent to 18 percent. Garza originally was running in the 34th District, but she dropped out when Rep. Vicente Gonzalez decided to run there instead of in the successor seat to his current district, the 15th. Now she could find herself running statewide against Paxton (if they both advance from likely runoffs), which could be Democrats’ best (maybe only) shot at competing for a statewide office in November.

In Texas’s 15th District, we’re probably headed to a runoff in the Democratic primary between attorney andveteran Ruben Ramirez, who has 28.6 percent of the vote according to the New York Times, and one of three other candidates: attorney John Rigney, small business owner Michelle Vallejo and educator Eliza Alvarado, who are bunched up at 20.4 percent, 19.5 percent and 16.6 percent of the vote, respectively. Ramirez is the preferred choice of a lot of Democrats in D.C., who think he’s the best option to hold onto this highly competitive seat. More interesting, however, is that roughly the same number of votes seem to have been cast in the GOP primary (21,915) as in the Democratic contest (22,834), which is ominous for Democrats trying to hold onto a historically blue seat.