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

It was a busy night in politics, both for policy with the State of the Union and for elections with Texas’s primaries. In the latter, though, there wasn’t a lot of statewide drama. There were a number of things we were watching tonight, but one of the main stories ended up being scandal-ridden Republican Attorney General Ken Paxton, who will now face a primary runoff in May, probably against Land Commissioner George P. Bush, although as of 12:25 a.m. Eastern the No. 2 in that race hadn’t yet been called.

I mentioned earlier tonight the strong hold that Trump continues to have on the GOP in Texas (many Republicans in the state have a popular view of the former president), and indeed, there were many strong performances by Republican incumbents who voted against certifying the 2020 election in the U.S. House — every one handily won renomination or looked to be on their way in a couple of uncalled races.

But in an example of how our politics are often full of contradictions, most Republicans who voted to certify the election did well, too — except Rep. Van Taylor, who is hovering right around the 50 percent mark and may not be able to avoid a runoff in the 3rd District. As we wrote about earlier, Taylor faced a number of attacks for his vote to certify the 2020 election results and for his support of a commission to investigate the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol.

Many congressional primaries are too close to call at this point, in particular the 28th District, where the Democratic primary is neck-and-neck between Rep. Henry Cuellar and challenger Jessica Cisneros, and may be headed for a runoff. Should Cisneros win, though, she would join the ranks of fellow progressive Greg Casar, who handily won the primary for the open race in the safely blue 35th District, helping notch another high-profile win for progressives in Texas’s Democratic primaries tonight.

That said, it’s worth noting that despite all the excitement, tonight is a bit of a false start to the 2022 primary season. That’s because the next state primaries aren’t until the beginning of May, two months from now. Unlike in a presidential primary year, when there are multiple primaries practically every Tuesday in March, that’s very much not the case in this midterm year. So we’ll have to wait a bit before we can see how future nomination races play out.

As always, thanks for following along, and scroll back through to relive the liveblog in all its chronological glory. And if there are any big developments in the races too close to call now, we’ll post an update here tomorrow.