Noting this for the record.
With the possible exception of U.S. Senate nominee James Talarico, the most relieved Democrats after Tuesday’s primary might be U.S. Reps. Henry Cuellar and Vicente Gonzalez of South Texas.
Their relief has less to do with the fact that each easily secured renomination against lesser-known challengers. What matters more is the raw vote totals: in both districts, Democratic turnout matched or exceeded the total number of Republican votes cast in the GOP primaries.
That’s significant because both districts were redrawn last year by the Republican-controlled state Legislature at the urging of President Donald Trump, who wanted as many as five additional winnable Texas seats for the GOP in November’s midterm elections.
Consider Cuellar’s 28th Congressional District, anchored by his home base in Laredo but stretching into rural Southwest Texas where Republicans showed surprising strength in the 2024 presidential election. That display of newfound muscle convinced Republican map drawers that they might finally be able to unseat Cuellar, even though he’s been racking up votes in the region since the 1990s, when he was first elected to the Texas House.
Tuesday’s results told a different story.
Cuellar drew just over 39,000 votes, about 58% total in a three-way race. In all, 67,401 votes were cast in the district’s Democratic primary, according to the Texas Secretary of State’s Office. On the Republican side, Webb County Judge Tano Tijerina captured nearly 75% of the vote against a single rival. But his raw total was just 12,487 votes out of 16,792 ballots cast.
Put simply, Democrats outvoted Republicans by more than a 4-to-1 margin in a district designed to give the GOP the edge.
A similar pattern emerged farther south the Rio Grande in Brownsville, the anchor city of the 34th Congressional District.
Gonzalez received 35,249 votes against his only challenger, good for 63% of the 56,198 ballots cast in the Democratic primary.
The GOP certainly treated the race that way: eight Republicans entered the newly drawn District 34 primary.
Combined, those eight Republican candidates received 36,520 votes — slightly more than Gonzalez himself, but nearly 20,000 fewer than the total number of Democratic votes cast in the district.
None of this guarantees that Cuellar or Gonzalez will win in November. But it also doesn’t point to the kind of Republican landslide that some political strategists and GOP leaders predicted after South Texas shifted toward Trump in 2024.
I’ve yammered on at length about how the newly-drawn districts depend heavily on what happened in 2024, and that the more things change from there, especially in a direction back towards how they were before, the better off Dems will be and the more foolish the whole exercise will look for the GOP. The most high-profile of those targets are the two incumbent Dems who are running again in their current districts, and columnist John Moritz updates us on them here. Which I appreciate, but I will also note that if the number of votes cast in the primary is the metric we’re going to use, we could use it more broadly than that. I spent a few minutes on the SOS election returns page, and this is what I found:
Dist GOP Dem
======================
CD02 65,839 48,595*
CD03 79,134 48,612*
CD08 62,597 42,317
CD09 31,544 34,673
CD10 74,947 53,602
CD12 54,814* 51,524
CD15 30,003* 54,518
CD21 95,128 65,947
CD22 63,020 47,981
CD23 55,062 58,950
CD24 71,351* 60,212
CD26 73,416 56,940
CD28 16,792 67,401
CD31 77,355 55,307
CD32 69,062 57,388
CD34 36,520 56,198
CD35 46,989 54,558
CD38 61,238 52,286
The asterisks denote uncontested primaries, where one might see a larger number of undervotes and thus a smaller total than might be representative. Redistricted CDs 09 and 35 also saw greater Democratic activity, and so did Republican-held CDs 15 and 23, which has been in the news quite a bit these days, as the mostly normal but scandal-plagued Rep. Tony Gonzales is stepping down and Brandon “I am not a Nazi, I just really like reading Mein Kampf” Herrera replaces him on the November ballot. CD15 was won by Beto by a fairly wide margin in 2018, while CD23 has at best been a purple-hued white whale for Dems, and here they are again in the conversation whether invited to be or not.
I want to be clear, I am presenting this data for amusement purposes only. Like Moritz, I am not claiming that any of these numbers Mean Something, just that I looked out of curiosity and I was interested in what I found. I can’t do a comparison with a previous year because (duh) the districts were different then. All I can do is present these numbers, with no extra context. Caveat emptor, your mileage may vary, product may settle during shipping, all sales are final.
Any chance you could include TX 14 in future analysis? Some of us who used to be in TX22 got gerrymandered there.
Flypusher, sure. For CD14:
Dem votes = 51,078 in 2026, and 21,310 in 2022
GOP votes = 62,864 in 2026, and 65,471 in 2022
Pretty impressive, actually. CD14 is not on my list of even fringy swing districts. Those numbers look like another data point in the “GOP lacking enthusiasm” column.
If you group “The Valley” / “The Border” voting block oft-mentioned in the media, how sizable a number of voters is it compared to the major urban centers of Texas?
Bill, they’re not that big, certainly not anywhere close to the big urban counties. But the biggest counties in that region – I classify El Paso as a “big urban” – are Hidalgo (217K votes cast in 2024) and Cameron (116K votes). That’s not nothing, and Webb County adds another 66K. Trump carried the three of them by about 14K votes in 2024, while Biden carried them by 70K in 2020. That’s a pretty damn big shift.