It was a tight race all night, but it looks like MJ Hegar will win.
MJ Hegar
MJ Hegar was holding a 5-percentage-point lead over Royce West on Tuesday night in the Democratic primary runoff for U.S. Senate, according to unofficial results.
With 71% of polling locations reporting, Hegar was ahead of West, 52.4% to 47.6%. Hegar is the former Air Force helicopter pilot endorsed by the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, and West is the longtime state senator from Dallas.
Speaking to reporters shortly after 10 p.m., Hegar said she was not declaring victory yet but felt “very confident.”
West and his campaign, meanwhile, said the runoff was still too close to call and that they expected it to come down to about 10,000 votes.
With about three-fourths of the precincts reporting, Hegar was leading by 40K votes. I don’t think there’s enough time, or enough outstanding ballots, for West to make up the ground. For what it’s worth, West had about a 3K vote lead in Harris County after early voting, but Hegar whittled away at that on Election Day, and very slowly stretched her lead out over the state. There was some bad blood in this race towards the end, and West picked up a number of endorsements from elected officials, while John Cornyn ran some ads stoking the fire. I expect people will mostly forget about all that in November, but for now there’s some healing to do.
In the Railroad Commissioner race, Chrysta Castaneda led everywhere I looked in early voting by a wide amount, and then kept adding to it. She was easily over 60% as Election Day results were coming in. I called that race on Twitter pretty much right away.
We’ve talked about the potential pickup of the Senate seat, as that is one extra reason for the Biden campaign to invest in Texas. The polling we’ve had in the Senate race doesn’t suggest a top tier opportunity, but it’s not like John Cornyn is anywhere near fifty percent, nor is he appreciably ahead of Trump in his level of support. Basically, if Joe Biden can win Texas, or maybe even if he can just come really close to winning Texas, MJ Hegar/Royce West can win that race as well.
The thing is, that also holds true for the RRC race and the statewide judicial races. I can make the argument that Biden will run ahead of other Dems (mostly because there will still be some Republican crossover at the Presidential level but not downballot, as was the case in 2016), and I can also make the argument that Trump will run ahead of other Republicans (mostly because I think there will be more vote-for-Trump-only people than vote-for-Biden-only people, and maybe because the third party vote will be bigger downballot than at the top, as it usually is in Presidential years), but the same basic calculus holds. If Biden wins Texas, the odds are good he will have company. If he falls short, even by less than a point, the odds are no one else makes it across. The national folks have very little reason to care about these races, but the rest of us should.