Midterm primary season is upon us, as voters in three states on Tuesday begin to answer critical questions facing both political parties as they head into elections that will decide control of Congress.
Do both parties want to appeal to their base voters or to moderates? How angry are Democratic and Republican voters at their parties’ old guards? Can scandals still topple incumbents? What has changed since 2024?
The marquee race is the Senate primary contest in Texas, which has broken records with more spending on advertising than any primary in American history. On the Republican side, the embattled Senator John Cornyn, 74, faces a serious threat from Ken Paxton, the scandal-scarred state attorney general and a favorite of the MAGA base. If neither gets more than 50 percent of the vote, there will be a runoff election in late May.
The hard-to-predict Democratic primary pits two rising stars against each other: James Talarico, a telegenic state legislator, and Representative Jasmine Crockett, a provocateur known for battling Republicans.
As North Carolina and Arkansas also hold elections, about half a dozen members of the U.S. House are racing to stave off defeat in their primaries.
Here’s what to watch:
Can Cornyn keep up with Paxton?
First elected in 2002, Mr. Cornyn is the underdog in his own re-election. He has required tens of millions of dollars in advertising from national Republican groups that openly warn that Mr. Paxton’s nomination would jeopardize the seat for the party.
Yet Mr. Paxton has enjoyed loyal support from the right-wing base despite his history of scandal: impeachment, an indictment and his wife’s announcement last year that they would divorce “on biblical grounds.”
The race was complicated last fall by the entry of Representative Wesley Hunt, one of the few Black Republicans in Congress, making a runoff more likely. The primary within the primary has been the quest for President Trump’s endorsement — which has still not arrived. Some polls showed Mr. Hunt rising to challenge Mr. Cornyn for a spot in a runoff, and in recent weeks, groups supporting both Mr. Cornyn and Mr. Paxton have attacked Mr. Hunt in ads.
Now the question is how close Mr. Cornyn can keep the race with Mr. Paxton on Tuesday.
The race has been ugly at times. A recent ad from the official campaign arm of Senate Republicans — who could soon have to defend Mr. Paxton if he wins the nomination — called him “crooked” and a “wife-cheater and fraud.”
Mr. Cornyn said in a brief interview that the runoff could get even more intense. “We’ve had to modulate the campaign, given the fact that there were three people in the race,” he said. “Now we’ll be able to turn our full attention to the attorney general.”
He seemed to smirk.
“He’s the one who picked this fight,” he added of Mr. Paxton, “and we’re going to finish it.”
Will Texas Democrats pick Talarico or Crockett?
Soon after Mr. Talarico joined the Senate race, he captured the imaginations of many Democratic activists and donors: He is a seminarian who uses the Bible to preach a progressive politics of inclusion, and even love, that they hoped would resonate in a red state.
He vaulted from nowhere to become one of his party’s top fund-raisers.
His initial rival, former Representative Colin Allred, dropped out of the race in December to make room for a surprise challenger: Ms. Crockett. A Dallas-area Democrat, she has repeatedly gone viral for her sharp words and clashes with Republicans. Mr. Trump has attacked her, and Ms. Crockett turned his demeaning remarks into a memorable kickoff video that cast her as a fighter.
The contest has been intense and has revolved, at times, around race. Mr. Talarico is white. Ms. Crockett is Black. Her supporters have argued that the idea of electability, which has been a key underpinning of Mr. Talarico’s appeal, has racist undertones. Ms. Crockett, for her part, has promised to try to expand the electorate by mobilizing disaffected Democrats.
In the final days, Gov. Greg Abbott, a Republican, has tried to elevate Ms. Crockett, featuring her in ads alongside progressives like Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Senator Bernie Sanders. There is a long, bipartisan history of one party intervening in the other’s primary to help a candidate seen as weaker in a general election.
Polls have shown a tight primary race.
Is there a blue wave of Democratic primary voters?
Democrats are excited by the sheer number of people voting in the party’s primary, in a state long dominated by Republicans.
In an interview on Sunday, Gina Hinojosa, a Democratic front-runner for governor and a state legislator, pulled out her phone to show the latest figures from Bexar County, which includes San Antonio.
“It is crazy turnout,” she said. “Conventional wisdom and history is that high excitement and energy in the primary follows us through to the general election. So it’s a wonderful indicator of the excitement that we’re seeing on the ground.”
The turnout figures are indeed jarring.
Take Starr County, which sits along the Texas-Mexico border, and which shifted the furthest to the right of any county in America from 2012 to 2024, when Mr. Trump won it with 56 percent of the vote.
Yet even before Primary Day this year, significantly more of the county’s voters (8,465) had cast ballots in the Democratic primary than voted for former Vice President Kamala Harris (6,862) in 2024.
Are Democrats in a mood to toss incumbents?
The Democratic Party’s disastrous 2024 experience, as President Joseph R. Biden Jr. quit his re-election bid early, has forced a reckoning over the party’s aging leadership.
And so starting on Tuesday, several older House Democratic incumbents are facing the most robust primary fights of their career.
Among them is Representative Al Green, 78, who is running for a 12th term; his opponent, Representative Christian Menefee, 37, just won his seat in a special election a month ago. The two men are competing for a single seat because Republicans erased one Democratic district in their redistricting gambit last year.
Mr. Green has been a fixture of Texas Democratic politics for more than two decades and is best known nationally for his State of the Union protests. Mr. Menefee has promised that he will bring fresh energy.
In North Carolina, Representative Valerie Foushee, 69, is being challenged by Nida Allam, 32, a county commissioner running to her left, in a rematch of their 2024 primary contest. More than $4.5 million in outside spending has poured into the race.
And Mr. Allred, after dropping out of the Senate race, is seeking to return to the House and challenging the woman who replaced him, Representative Julie Johnson.
Will an ugly scandal take down Tony Gonzales?
Representative Tony Gonzales, a Republican who represents a Texas border district, is facing not just a primary but also intensifying pressure from Republican colleagues to resign after allegations that he pressured a staff member into a sexual relationship; that aide later killed herself.
The husband of Mr. Gonzales’s former aide recently released text messages between her and the lawmaker.
Mr. Gonzales was in jeopardy of losing even before the latest allegations. He won his nomination in 2024 with only 50.6 percent of the vote to 49.4 percent for Brandon Herrera, a gun activist and YouTube personality. Mr. Herrera is running again.
Mr. Herrera, who is known as the AK Guy and has nearly 4.2 million subscribers on YouTube, is a lightning rod himself. In the 2024 race, attack ads featured clips of his show in which he appeared to mock veterans who had died by suicide.
Mr. Trump endorsed Mr. Gonzales in December.
Can Dan Crenshaw beat back a right-wing challenge?
Representative Dan Crenshaw, the only congressional Republican in Texas who does not have Mr. Trump’s endorsement, is facing a primary challenge from Steve Toth, a state representative who has the backing of Senator Ted Cruz. Last year’s redistricting changed the district lines and added Mr. Toth’s home.
Mr. Crenshaw was tagged as a rising star when he first won his seat to Congress, but he has proudly picked fights with some of the party’s leading right-wing figures. He did not echo Mr. Trump’s lies that he won the 2020 election and has mocked some on the right as unserious “performance artists” and “grifters.”
Mr. Cruz has recorded a late ad to lift Mr. Toth.
Shane Goldmacher is a Times national political correspondent.
The post What to Watch in Tuesday’s Primaries in Texas and Beyond appeared first on New York Times.
