With now more than 95 percent reporting, it appears Monica De La Cruz will avoid a runoff and clinch the Republican nomination for the open seat in the 15th Congressional District. This is the lone Texas district that is deemed competitive, with a 2020 presidential margin within five points.

Earlier in the day, Greg Casar was praying for a 50-percent-plus-one win. By 8:30 p.m., it became clear that he was the Democratic nominee for the 35th Congressional District, all but ensuring a win in the general election. Congress seems like an inevitable reality, he told supporters.

Speaking to supporters in Laredo, Jessica Cisneros says “We’re probably not going to know the full results tonight,” but adds that they are holding out hope in the 28th Congressional District race for tonight, tomorrow — or May (when there would be a runoff). “We don’t let that hope die, because we know we deserve so much better.”

With just over 70 percent of the results in, the Democratic bid for the open seat in Texas’ competitive 15th District appears destined for a runoff. No candidate is above 30 percent at the moment; Ruben Ramirez leads with 28 percent.

George P. Bush appears to be opening up a lead over Eva Guzman in the attorney general’s race. The incumbent, Ken Paxton, told supporters that he’s preparing for a runoff.

Representative Vicente Gonzalez, a Democrat who narrowly beat a Republican challenger in 2020, has easily avoided a runoff in the 34th, the neighboring Rio Grande Valley district in which he’s now running after the lines were redrawn earlier this year.

Cheers broke out for the first time at Jessica Cisneros’ watch party, as the large screens flashed results showing her with her just above 50 percent in the 28th Congressional District. There are still a lot of votes out in rural counties, where Donald Trump performed well in 2020, but it's also worth noting that Senator Bernie Sanders did well in those counties during the Democratic presidential primary.

Jessica Cisneros has dipped below 50 percent, with rural Starr and Zapata Counties still not reporting. Zapata flipped to Donald Trump in 2020. There’s a good chance this race is going to a runoff, and, as Cisneros feared, the other progressive in the race, Tannya Benavides, is playing the spoiler, with nearly 5 percent of the vote.

Jessica Cisneros has lost a lot of her early lead, with Representative Henry Cuellar so far taking 60 percent of the vote in Webb County, the 28th District’s largest population base.

Targeting transgender people to rally conservatives is a Texas tradition since a 2015 “bathroom bill” in Houston. Ahead of these elections, Attorney General Ken Paxton and Gov. Greg Abbott, both facing challenges from the right, said parents who helped children get treatments could be pursued for child abuse.

In the increasingly blue Harris County, more Republicans voted early (105,482) than Democrats (96,725).

When he ran for the Senate four years ago, Democrat Beto O’Rourke won just 61 percent in the primary. In Hidalgo County, on the border with Mexico, he won just 50 percent. But today, with two-thirds of the Hidalgo vote in, Mr. O’Rourke was at 81 percent, suggesting he would do far better in the primary for governor than he did for Senate.

Jessica Cisneros is performing well in San Antonio section of the 28th Congressional District, but more telling will be results from Webb County, which includes Laredo.

Four years after rocketing to national fame with a strong but ultimately failed effort to unseat Senator Ted Cruz, Beto O’Rourke will be the Democratic nominee for Texas governor. But taking out Gov. Greg Abbott may be an even greater challenge.

To me, the most astonishing thing about the Texas primaries is that in 2020 there were more than a dozen competitive House districts in the state. Today, after redistricting to protect Republican seats, there is just one that will be competitive in the general election, the 15th.

Progressives have gone all in on the Cisneros-Cuellar race. The Working Families Party sent out a memo noting that its volunteers had knocked on 80,000 doors in the state.

Don Huffines, an ultraconservative challenger to Gov. Greg Abbott, issued a statement all but conceding, and seeking credit for forcing the governor to the right on issues. “Though I will not be contesting the outcome of this election, I will not be going away,” he said in a statement.

This is the first statewide election in Texas that allows voters to fix issues with their absentee ballots, a process known as “curing.” But deadlines for fixing ballots vary based on the reasons and method of rejecting a ballot, which has caused some confusion among Texas voters.

Texas election rules require that primary candidates receive at least 50 percent of the vote. The top two candidates in races where no one reaches that threshold will meet in runoff contests on May 24.

Today’s primary marks the first statewide test of the new voting law, which has already led to a significant surge in rejections of absentee ballots because of new identification requirements. The number of rejected ballots in Harris County alone has surpassed the statewide total during the 2020 general election.