Thank you to everyone who joined us for live coverage of the Texas, North Carolina, and Arkansas primaries last night! As you’ve likely heard, the top line takeaway is that state Rep. James Talarico is advancing to the general election in Texas’s Senate race, while Sen. John Cornyn and Attorney General Ken Paxton are advancing to a runoff.
It’s probably the best case scenario for Democrats — a clear victory by the candidate many in the party viewed as more electable and a protracted fight on the other side. There’s another reason Democrats are probably excited by the results last night as well. With 92 percent of the expected vote counted, it looks like more Democratic ballots were cast in the Texas primaries than Republican ballots by a slim margin. It’s another marker of the enthusiasm advantage Democrats enjoy under an unpopular Trump presidency.
We talked about these trends and a whole lot more throughout the evening, including heated House primaries on both sides of the aisle, where tension played out over ideology, age, style, and scandal. You can relive the night in the video above or fast forward to some of the conclusions from the evening. As a benchmark, we concluded that Talarico was extremely likely to win his primary at 1:03:00.
A big thank you to friends of the podcast Mary Radcliffe, Lakshya Jain, Eli McKown-Dawson, Lenny Bronner, Nathaniel Rakich, and Erin Covey for their nerdy and irreverent coverage throughout the evening.
