It’s primary election day in Texas.
Texas voters will decide on Tuesday which candidates will meet in November for the midterm general election.
How does it work?
Each political party will hold an election in which party members as well as independents can vote. Only the candidates who win those elections will be placed on the general election ballot in November.
Throughout the night, the Office of the Texas Secretary of State and county clerks will release results. For higher-profile races, major news organizations will also update election results on their websites.
Regardless of where results come out, it is unlikely that complete vote totals will be released on election night.
“Don’t react to every new piece of data that comes in unless you look at how much of the data that accounts for,” said Joshua Blank, director of research for the Texas Politics Project. “If it’s 1% or 5% or 10%, you have to intuitively know that there’s a lot of votes to be counted.”
What are we looking for?
50% is the magic number on primary night. In order to win a primary election outright, a candidate must win a majority of the votes. If nobody does, the top two candidates will compete in a May runoff election. Typically, races with a larger number of high-profile candidates are more likely to enter a runoff, Blank said.
“Nobody wants to be in a runoff because it draws resources that could go towards the general election,” Blank said.
“Any candidate in a runoff has already run in a primary in which more than half of the electorate has voted for somebody else … that’s a challenge,” Blank said. “If (the runoff) gets heated, then both candidates end up getting injured by the other through negative campaigning.”
Who’s running?
Incumbent Gov. Greg Abbott and Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick face little serious opposition in their bids for their fourth nominations in their respective offices. Both have campaigned on property tax legislation.
Both seem likely to face two Austin legislators — state Reps. Gina Hinojosa, who represents UT and West Campus, and Vikki Goodwin. The two have criticized Abbott and Patrick over their education policy.
For U.S. Senate, Texas Politics Project polling shows U.S. Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, slightly behind Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton. Paxton has accused Cornyn, who has held the seat since 2002, of not standing up for Republican values.
U.S. Rep. Wesley Hunt, R-Houston, is also running for Senate, which is likely to go into a runoff, said Evan Smith, a professor of practice at the LBJ School of Public Affairs. Smith also said the number of Republican candidates seeking to replace Paxton as attorney general would likely push that race into a runoff.
While Democrats also have a competitive primary for the senate seat, Smith said that race is less likely to go into a runoff because there are two major candidates: U.S. Rep. Jasmine Crockett, D-Dallas, and state Rep. James Talarico, D-Austin.
In UT’s newly drawn congressional district, U.S. Rep. Greg Casar is the only major candidate running in the Democratic primary after Rep. Lloyd Doggett announced he would not run last August. UT’s district has not elected a Republican since the campus was split across four districts in 2020.
