Stop me if you’ve heard this before. After a hard-fought election in which a candidate supported by the far right lost, right-wing legislators took to social media to proclaim that the race was “stolen” and that it was the Democrats’ fault. Last night, after Speaker of the Texas House Dade Phelan narrowly escaped defeat in a runoff in a district anchored in Beaumont, his nemesis, Attorney General Ken Paxton, cried foul. “Dade Phelan, in a desperate attempt to secure his political future, orchestrated a strategy that relied on Democrats voting for him in the Republican runoff,” Paxton wrote in a statement. “He knew he couldn’t win on his own merit, so he sought to bolster his chances by courting Democrat support in his district.” Paxton wasn’t alone. Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick, another Phelan antagonist, got downright confessional: “If I had to rely on Democrats to win a Republican Primary, I wouldn’t run.” 

Of course, Phelan didn’t steal the election, as Paxton claims. Texas does not have registration by party, and voters can elect which primary to vote in every March, no matter their personal political affiliation. In the Republican runoffs, any registered voter who didn’t cast a ballot in the Democratic primary two months ago was allowed to vote. (And, notably, while there were statewide Democratic elections this March, there wasn’t a Democratic Texas House primary in Phelan’s district that might have drawn members of the party to the polls.) But is the right wing correct that Democrats turned out for Phelan and sent him to victory? 

First, the overall numbers. Phelan bested his challenger, David Covey, by 366 votes on Tuesday. (Covey won by 1,015 votes in March but did not eclipse 50 percent of the vote, sending the race to a runoff.) Covey, an oil and gas consultant, had the backing of Patrick, Paxton, and Donald Trump, who were upset that Phelan oversaw Paxton’s impeachment vote last year. A coalition of big business interests lined up behind Phelan, while right-wing megadonors, led by Midland oilman and Christian nationalist Tim Dunn, supported Covey, making the race the most expensive Texas House race in state history. 

We’re still waiting for data on Election Day voters, but the early vote indicates that Democrats might have swung the race. According to Derek Ryan, a Republican data guru who maintained the Texas GOP’s voter file for two decades, 1,100 early voters in this race, or 7 percent of all early voters, had voted most recently in a Democratic primary (as good an indication that someone is a Democrat as exists in a state without registration by party). While we don’t know for sure whom these voters cast ballots for, it is likely that a good chunk supported Phelan—who is very conservative but to the left of Covey. Phelan won the early vote by 962 votes. “Based on that data point, it does appear that Democrats helped him win this race,” Ryan said. 

But most voters who cast their ballots ahead of election night (72 percent) had previously voted in a Republican primary and had no Democratic primary history since 2016. And there’s a large chunk of voters whose past primary history paints a murkier picture of their party affiliation. According to Ryan, about 2,800 voters (16 percent) had no primary history—Republican or Democratic—prior to March. Another 6 percent of early voters, Ryan said, had primary history from both parties but had most recently voted in a Republican primary. 

Of course, there’s no guarantee a closed primary would have ensured Covey’s victory. “It’s tough to say that if the primary was closed, Phelan would’ve lost,” Ryan said, “because we don’t know how many of those Democrats would register as Republicans under a closed primary system.”

Phelan’s spokesperson did not respond to a request for an interview about whether Phelan intentionally targeted Democratic voters, as his critics allege. Representative Jeff Leach, a Plano Republican aligned with the Speaker, says the campaign did not. “I knocked on doors, hundreds and hundreds of doors, made calls for Dade,” Leach said in a radio interview Wednesday morning. “I did not speak to a single Democrat down here in HD 21. Not a single one.”

And even if Phelan did target Democratic voters, winning votes is what elections are about. What Paxton is really trying to say is that he’s peeved that the wrong kind of voters (i.e., those who voted against his chosen candidate) turned out in higher numbers.

Phelan’s win has once again prompted calls within the right wing of the party to close Texas’s primaries. Delegates at the Republican Party’s state convention on Friday voted to close primaries, in a move intended to stop Democrats from voting in GOP contests. It’s unclear whether the state party has the authority to close primaries without the approval of the Legislature, but a Texas GOP spokesperson said the party is ready to fight in court if it is sued for its decision. No matter the evidence, the GOP is committed to its new crusade.