Texas primary results
Texas Gov. Greg Abbott won’t have to concern himself with a runoff in May. Abbott easily defeated a total of seven primary opponents, including Allen West and former state Sen. Don Huffines. Abbott won the support of 66% of Texans — Texas has open primaries, meaning party registration is not required. His closest challengers, West and Huffines, received a mere 12%.
On the Democratic side, Beto O’Rourke won the Democratic nomination in a walk, getting 91% against four obscure candidates.
The two now advance to the general election in November, when Abbott will vie for his third term, while Beto, who lost to Ted Cruz for the Senate in 2018 and launched a failed 2020 presidential bid, will try to avoid his third straight loss.
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The race for Texas attorney general will go to a runoff. Incumbent Ken Paxton received 42.7% of the vote, and George P. Bush got 23%. Two other challengers, U.S. House Rep. Louie Gohmert and Eva Guzman, a former judge with the Texas Supreme Court, both received approximately 17% of the vote.
The question is whether or not Bush can peel away enough of the support thrown behind Gohmert and Guzman to overtake Paxton, who maintains a lot of support despite legal and ethical troubles.
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Democratic Rep. Henry Cuellar and Jessica Cisneros will also battle it out in a runoff after neither candidate got to 50% on March 1. Cuellar, the incumbent, received just over 48%, while Cisneros, who has the backing of the Justice Democrats PAC, Sen. Bernie Sanders, and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, received 47%.
While this race is only for a nomination, fewer than 50,000 people turned out to vote. If Cuellar and Cisneros’s backers don’t like the results, they might want to find out why so few people voted in a district where nearly 230,000 cast a vote in the 2020 general election.
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Dim bulbs of the week
Stacey Abrams
She seems to be looking for a permanent spot on these pages. During an appearance on the hard-hitting Daily Show, Stacey Abrams had the audacity to compare her passion for “voting rights” with that of what’s happening in Ukraine, clumsily invoking words from President Volodymyr Zelensky about democracy as if a limited number of voter drop boxes is anything at all like having your home country invaded and bombed by a foreign adversary. And for the record, Ms. Abrams, Ukraine requires voter identification to participate in elections.
Rashida Tlaib
It’s customary for someone in the opposition party to deliver a response to the president’s State of the Union address. So what in the world was Democratic Rep. Rashida Tlaib doing giving a response to a fellow Democrat? She claims it was to support President Joe Biden. She took a page from the standard Democratic playbook, calling Republicans the party of the rich and powerful. However, she also took a swipe at Sens. Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona, calling them “corporate-backed Democratic obstructionists.” She also said Russia and Ukraine should declare a “ceasefire” in that conflict. That sound you hear is Russian President Vladimir Putin laughing. Tlaib’s speech served no useful purpose, and other Democrats were unhappy with her stunt.
