Texas 2022 primary election

The Texas Democratic primary for attorney general will proceed to a runoff, CNN projects.

Rochelle Garza will advance to the runoff, but the second spot is too early to call.

The Texas Republican primary for attorney general will proceed to a runoff, CNN projects.

Incumbent Ken Paxton will advance to the runoff, but the second spot is too early to call.

Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick and Comptroller Glenn Hegar will win their respective primaries, CNN projected on Tuesday. The Republicans were both backed by former President Donald Trump.

Their projected wins came alongside Texas Gov. Greg Abbott’s projected victory in the Republican gubernatorial primary. Abbott, too, was endorsed by Trump.

While none of these primaries were particularly competitive, they still highlight Trump’s influence over the Republican Party. Trump has sought to play GOP kingmaker since leaving office, and his endorsement is coveted in Republican primaries across the country.

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott will win the Republican gubernatorial primary, CNN projects.

Seeking his third-term as Texas’ top executive, Abbott fended off a primary challenge from seven Republican candidates including Don Huffines, a former state senator, and Allen West, a former Florida congressman and former chairman of the Texas Republican Party.

Buoyed by name recognition, a massive campaign war chest, and the backing of former President Donald Trump, Abbott – who got his start in Texas politics as a state district judge before serving on the Texas Supreme Court and as state attorney general – was the heavy favorite to secure the GOP nomination.

He spent most of his primary campaign attacking, Beto O’Rourke – the former Texas congressman who ran unsuccessfully for the US Senate in 2018 and the Democratic presidential nomination in 2020. O’Rourke also will win his party’s nomination, CNN projected on Tuesday night.

Beto O’Rourke will win the Democratic gubernatorial primary in Texas, CNN projects.

O’Rourke, the former Texas congressman who ran unsuccessfully for the US Senate in 2018 and the Democratic presidential nomination in 2020, was heavily favored to come out on top Tuesday. In doing so, he defeated candidates Inocencio Barrientez, Michael Cooper, Joy Diaz and Rich Wakeland to secure the Democratic nomination.

O’Rourke shot to stardom with a near-miss Senate campaign in 2018 against GOP Sen. Ted Cruz. But his failed 2020 Democratic presidential primary run left his national brand badly dented in the eyes of many within the party.

Still, O’Rourke remains popular among Democrats on his home turf — building a following in Texas much larger than any other Democrat in a generation. In between his campaigns, he has remained active, campaigning for state legislative candidates and activating his volunteers when the state’s power grid failed last winter.

Yet, Republicans argue that many of the positions he took during that run, including advocating for mandatory assault weapon buybacks, will hurt him in Texas.

Anticipating the likely match up, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott – who was projected by CNN to win his party’s primary on Tuesday night  – spent most of his primary campaign attacking O’Rourke, using the Democratic politician’s left-leaning policy proposals as campaign fodder.

Abbott’s campaign has accused O’Rourke of flip-flopping and backtracking on comments he made about the southern border, guns and the Green New Deal while running for president in 2020.

A poll of registered Texas voters conducted in late January and early February by the University of Texas/Texas Politics Project found Abbott leading O’Rourke by 10 percentage points in a likely match-up, 47% to 37%.

And even though O’Rourke has largely kept pace in fundraising since entering the race in November, Abbott, a two-term governor, currently has a massive financial advantage, with about $50 million in the bank to O’Rourke’s $6.8 million as of Feb. 20, campaign finance records show.

Polls are now closing statewide in Texas.

Two big-name Republicans, Gov. Greg Abbott and Attorney General Ken Paxton, are seeking to beat back challenges from the right. In South Texas, the most conservative Democrat in the US House, Rep. Henry Cuellar, is attempting to survive a rematch against Jessica Cisneros, the progressive who nearly ousted him in the primary two years ago.

The contests will be the first test of how the restrictive new voting law enacted by Texas Republicans last year will reshape the electorate.

One important wrinkle in Texas: To win the primary, candidates don’t just have to beat their rivals but must win more than 50% of the vote. Otherwise, the top two finishers advance to a head-to-head runoff election on May 24. That threshold could play an important role in several House primaries.

CNN is monitoring results as they come in.

CNN’s Eric Bradner and Gregory Krieg contributed reporting to this post.

Results from Harris County, home to Houston, could be delayed.

County officials have informed the Secretary of State’s office that they are dealing with damaged ballot sheets that must be duplicated before they can be scanned and tabulated, according to a release from state election officials. As a result, county election officials have indicated they won’t be able to count and report results for early votes and Election Day votes by 7 p.m. local time Wednesday, as required by Texas law.

A Harris County election spokesperson did not immediately respond to a request for more information. Harris County is the most populous county in Texas and a Democratic stronghold.

It is now 8 p.m. ET (7 p.m. local time) and most polls across Texas are beginning to close.

The majority of Texas is on Central Time, but the western tip of the state around El Paso is on Mountain Time.

Polls statewide will be closing at 9 p.m. ET.

Today’s primary races set the scene for several key races up and down the Texas ballot this year, including the Lone Star State’s gubernatorial and attorney general elections.

Tuesday’s primary was also the first election to be held under Texas’ new elections law, which made significant changes to voting procedures in the state.

The law limited early voting hours, eliminated drive-through voting and added new ID requirements for mail voting, among other changes.

These are the key races we are tracking tonight:

CNN is monitoring race results as they come in.

CNN’s Rachel Janfaza, Ethan Cohen and Melissa DePalo contributed reporting to this post. 

People vote at the Carver Branch Library in Austin, Texas, on Tuesday.

The midterm election season kicked off Tuesday in Texas — with election workers, voters and voting rights activists reporting several glitches, including poll worker shortages, as Texans cast their ballots in person.

But election officials in the Lone Star State say the biggest challenge still looms: The scramble to fix the higher-than-usual number of mail-in ballots flagged for potential rejection under the state’s restrictive new voting law.

Officials in Harris County — home to Houston — had flagged as faulty nearly 30% of the more than 38,000 mail-in ballots received as of Monday because voters did not include identifying information on the return envelope, the county’s election chief Isabel Longoria told reporters Tuesday morning.

That means voters likely will cast more provisional ballots than typical on Election Day, she added.

Tuesday marks the first primaries of year. In Texas, the results will determine general election matchups for governor and a slew of statewide and legislative offices. If no candidate achieves more than 50% support, a runoff election is slated for May.

Tuesday also marks the first test of a new voting law passed by the Republican-controlled legislature last year. The law imposes new ID requirements to vote by mail, empowers partisan poll watchers and bans practices used by Harris County in 2020, such as 24-hour and drive-thru voting.

Texans who qualify to vote by mail felt the first consequences of the new law. It requires them to include identification numbers both when applying for a mail-in ballot and again on the inside flap of the envelope they use to return the ballot – a process that tripped up many in recent weeks.

Those problems surfaced again at polling places on Tuesday.

Joseph Egbon said he voted in person Tuesday because election officials rejected his mail-in ballot a few days ago.

“It was just last week they sent me the letter,” Egbon told CNN. “I didn’t want to argue so I said, ‘Let me just go ahead’” and vote in person.

Egbon said it was relatively easy to do so. It took just 15 minutes him to vote at the Bayland Park Community Center in southwestern Houston.

Only a subset of Texas voters are eligible to cast ballots by mail. They include those 65 and older, people who will be out of the county and voters who are disabled or ill.

Read the full story here.

As shoppers browsed the market stalls at the Pulga Los Portales in the Rio Grande Valley, Armando Acosta and Albino Zuniga caught up over breakfast before opening their lotería stand, where customers often stop to play the traditional Mexican bingo-style game.  

Over the past two years, these two friends have bonded through the twists and turns of the Covid-19 pandemic. But they diverge sharply over politics in this heavily Latino region of Texas, which had been viewed as a Democratic stronghold — until 2020.  

A man walks through the Pulga Los Portales flea market in Alton, Texas, on February 17, 2022.

Former President Donald Trump dramatically improved his performance in many of the counties bordering Mexico compared to four years earlier — gains that led the GOP this year to redouble efforts to recruit and invest in South Texas candidates, including many of Hispanic descent, up and down the ballot. The question now is whether the inroads the GOP made in 2020 will hold as Democrats try to cling to their House majority in November.  

Tuesday’s primaries in the Lone Star State — the first congressional primaries of 2022 — are an early test for the two parties as they try to turn out voters like Acosta, 40, and Zuniga, 56, with control of Congress eventually hinging on narrowly divided districts like this one.  

CNN spoke to several dozen Latino voters across the region, including here in the newly redrawn 15th District, an open seat that runs from the populous border areas near McAllen north to towns east of San Antonio. They raised an array of reasons why Trump resonated here more in 2020 than in 2016 — namely his relentless focus on getting the economy reopened after Covid shutdowns — as well as factors Democrats may need to address to win some of them back in 2022. 

Though many of his family members are Democrats, Zuniga backed Trump in the last presidential election, saying the then-President’s message on immigration resonated for him as a legal immigrant from Mexico and the father of a Border Patrol agent. Trump’s message about getting people back to work mid-pandemic also connected with the ethos of hard work and self-reliance Zuniga says is inherent in Hispanic culture along the border.

Albino Zuniga sits for a portrait at the Pulga Los Portales flea market in Alton, Texas.

He was repelled, Zuniga said, by what he sees as the liberal drift of the Democratic Party. Those feelings only deepened as he watched President Joe Biden and the Democrat-controlled Congress hand out more Covid-related benefits to certain individuals that he believes have been too generous.  

Though earlier Covid relief packages were passed under Trump with Republican support, that was a frequent criticism of Biden that CNN heard here from both Democratic and GOP voters voicing concerns about the economy and inflation.

But Acosta hopes Latino voters will reward Democrats in November for economic relief passed by Congress under Biden, arguing that Republicans often look after the wealthy instead of those in need. He is supporting the congressional candidacy of progressive Democrat Michelle Vallejo, who co-owns Pulga Los Portales with her family and has championed a $15 minimum wage and Medicare for All.

Read the full story here.

The first primaries of the 2022 midterms is unfolding in Texas, headlined by a feisty Republican scramble in the attorney general’s race, are poised to reverberate through both parties and set the landscape for elections in November that could swing control of Congress to Republicans.

But even as the results begin to filter in, Texas will share the spotlight with President Biden’s State of the Union address on Capitol Hill and the rapidly escalating crisis in Ukraine, where invading forces from Russia are moving in on major cities across the country.

Russian President Vladimir Putin’s troops were camped out on the Ukrainian border when early voting began in Texas on Feb. 14, and while the conflict appears unlikely to influence Tuesday night’s elections, quick-moving events at home and abroad underscore the challenges facing candidates as the 2022 midterms begin in earnest.

The banner contest on Tuesday revolves around Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton. The two-term incumbent, who filed a failed lawsuit seeking to effectively overturn the 2020 election, is running under a cloud of legal issues, with the possibility of more on the horizon, that his GOP challengers have argued could endanger the GOP’s effort to yet again sweep statewide offices.

Recent polling shows Paxton with a commanding lead in the four-way primary, but he’s likely to fall short of the majority needed to clinch the nomination, which would send the race to a runoff. The bigger question now: If Paxton falls short of the threshold, which of his opponents — all estimable candidates with broad followings and significant resources — will advance to a potential one-on-one contest in late May?

The narrow favorite to set a spring date with Paxton is Texas Land Commissioner George P. Bush, the latest in a political dynasty that, even with the Republican Party now in thrall to former President Trump, maintains a considerable stature in Texas political circles.

Like Bush, former Texas Supreme Court Justice Eva Guzman, who spent more than a decade on the state’s high court, is a relative moderate. The pair clashed in a recent debate, which saw Guzman question Bush’s qualifications and Bush denounce Guzman as a “gutter politician.” Of more concern to Paxton, at least as this first primary round shakes out, is the candidacy of US Rep. Louie Gohmert, whose ideological and geographic base overlaps with Paxton’s.

The primaries for governor figure to provide less drama. Two-term incumbent Republican Gov. Greg Abbott is well-positioned to see off a crowded field of GOP challengers and Democrat Beto O’Rourke, a former congressman and Senate and presidential candidate, is the overwhelming favorite to win the Democratic nomination.

Hanging over it all, though, are concerns — at least among Democrats and voting rights advocates — about the effect of the state’s restrictive new voting rules.

Texas will be the first of a number of Republican-led states to hold major elections after passing legislation, on the back of a political wave set off by Trump’s long campaign to sow doubt over his loss in 2020, that complicates mail-in voting and outlaws other efforts to make the ballot more accessible. Some larger Texas counties have already reported spikes in ballot rejections because would-be voters did not meet beefed-up and, to many, confusing new identification requirements.

Read the full story here.

Beto O’Rourke, Texas Democratic gubernatorial candidate, and Congressman Vicente Gonzalez, who represents Texas’ 15th Congressional District and is a candidate for the redrawn 34th Congressional District, speak with (left to right) Robert Lopez and James Roussett while canvassing a neighborhood in Brownsville, Texas.

When 63-year-old veteran Robert Lopez encountered Democratic gubernatorial candidate Beto O’Rourke recently as the candidate was door-knocking in Lopez’s hometown of Brownsville, he had just one question: what exactly is the Democratic Party’s plan for dealing with illegal immigration?  

It’s been a central concern for Lopez living in a border town and he isn’t sure Democrats are taking it seriously, which frustrates him as he watches the debate rage between the parties without either side ever settling on a solution. “The Democrats don’t help. The Republicans don’t help,” he said.  

In their exchange, O’Rourke had stressed his view that leaders should defer to local communities about what measures they want to take to enhance border security. (“I trust the people of Laredo, more than anyone else to decide what’s in their best interest security, economic and otherwise,” O’Rourke told Lopez, citing the example of how many in Laredo had voiced their opposition to the border wall last year). 

But Lopez is still not satisfied with answers from either side. He says he has struggled to understand whether Democrats have a message on border security. He gives Trump credit for drawing attention to the issue in a way Democrats haven’t — noting that he liked how Trump was vocal in his support for law enforcement officers and border patrol agents. His assertiveness on those issues was one of the things that Hispanic voters in South Texasliked about the former President, he added.

“‘Trump said, hey, we’re not taking this bull. Stop this, and boom. If we have to build a fence, we’ll build a fence.’” (Though Lopez doesn’t think the border wall amounts to a solution). 

Trump had “balls,” Lopez adds, while he thinks the jury is still out on President Biden, whose approval ratings have slid among independents in Texas.  

When it comes to border security: “We’re in limbo,” Lopez said in an interview after speaking to O’Rourke. 

He didn’t make it to the polls in 2020, even though he said he was “cheering” for Trump from the sidelines. And even after while recently driving his friend, James Roussett, to the polls to cast a Democratic ballot in the Texas primary, Lopez didn’t feel like it was worth it to cast one himself. 

When asked what it would take to get him out to the polls in November, he said he still waiting for a candidate who convinces him that his vote would matter: “You’d have to prove (that) to me some way, somehow,” he said. “People are getting tired here of the corruption.”

With the Texas midterm primary unfolding on the same day as President Biden’s “State of the Union” address, we had a chance to check in with Texans about the Democratic President’s performance thus far. Reviews were mixed and sometimes sour, which tracks with Biden’s slipping approval rating in Texas and nationally. 

One surprisingly common view among both Republicans and Democrats in South Texas is that the Biden administration and Democratic-controlled Congress gave out too much for Covid-19, which they believe is slowing the economic recovery and the pinch they are feeling from inflation (That’s a hot topic of debate nationally and it’s worth noting that much of the Covid-related aid originated under former President Donald Trump and was supported by the GOP). 

Other Texans felt Biden is unfairly being blamed for things beyond his control, like Jaqueline Martinez, a 29-year-old mother of a newborn and a 4-year-old son from Palmview, Texas. Still, she said her family has struggled to pay utility and land payments on time and have postponed renovating their RV, because it has been so difficult to save. 

Jaqueline Martinez sits for a portrait at the Pulga Los Portales flea market in Alton, Texas, on February 17, 2022.

“It’s been hitting us pretty hard,” said Martinez. “Every week now my husband is like ‘I have to add more gas (money) again’…. Instead of the usual $25, now it has to be $33, $35 within our family’s budget.” 

Because of all the economic struggles, she says that South Texas – where Trump and Republicans did better than expected in 2020 – now feels like “a battleground” where “you can feel the rivalry.” 

Her own disappointments with Biden and his administration stem from her status as “a dreamer” who benefited from the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, which has faced ongoing litigation and an effort to terminate it by Trump that was blocked by the Supreme Court. After a federal judge ruled in July that the program was illegal, Martinez and hundreds of thousands of others have been in legal limbo, and she wants to see Biden “fight harder” for a permanent solution. 

She said that the Biden administration has proposed a number of solutions for DACA recipients, but have not yet prevailed in finding a permanent fix: “You don’t give up, you have to keep fighting,” she said. “So I would suggest for them to keep fighting…. If they really want it.”

People arrive at a voting center in Austin, Texas, on March 1.

When Texas lawmakers redrew the state’s congressional districts last year, they effectively turned swing districts into a thing of the past. Battlegrounds were turned into safe seats, some for Republicans and some for Democrats.

That’s made the primaries the most intense competition for seats in the US House.

Republicans Reps. Dan Crenshaw, of Texas’ 2nd District, and Van Taylor, of the 3rd District, face challengers who argue they are insufficiently conservative and haven’t been supportive enough of Trump.

In the 8th District, where GOP Rep. Kevin Brady is retiring, establishment favorite Morgan Luttrell, a former Navy SEAL backed by House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy and the Congressional Leadership Fund super PAC, faces far-right opponent Christian Collins, who’s been supported by Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene and North Carolina Rep. Madison Cawthorn.

In two open-seat races that favor Democrats, two leading contenders – former Austin City Councilman Greg Casar in the 35th District, who, like Cisneros, has been endorsed by Ocasio-Cortez and Sanders, and state Rep. Jasmine Crockett in the 30th District – are all but certain to lead the pack, but the key question is whether they will cross the 50% threshold to avoid a runoff.

Texas kicks off the 2022 midterm elections today with the nation’s first primaries.

Two big-name Republicans, Gov. Greg Abbott and Attorney General Ken Paxton, will seek to beat back challenges from the right. In South Texas, the most conservative Democrat in the US House, Rep. Henry Cuellar, is attempting to survive a rematch against Jessica Cisneros, the progressive who nearly ousted him in the primary two years ago.

The contests will be the first test of how the restrictive new voting law enacted by Texas Republicans last year will reshape the electorate.

One important wrinkle in Texas: To win the primary, candidates don’t just have to beat their rivals but must win more than 50% of the vote. Otherwise, the top two finishers advance to a head-to-head runoff election on May 24. That threshold could play an important role in several House primaries.

Here are a few things to watch today:

Read more about today’s primaries here.

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, left, and Democratic nominee Beto O'Rourke

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott faces seven Republican opponents in Tuesday’s Republican primary as he seeks a third term leading the Lone Star State. But he has spent most of his campaign attacking the likely Democratic nominee, Beto O’Rourke.

Left-leaning policy proposals pushed by O’Rourke, a former Texas congressman, during his unsuccessful 2020 presidential campaign have become campaign fodder for Abbott in the more conservative state.

Abbott’s campaign views the primary as a “dress rehearsal for the general election,” Dave Carney, general consultant for Abbott’s reelection team, told CNN, adding that the focus was on turning out as many voters as possible “so that we just have a larger base to draw on for the general.”

Abbott began the campaign cycle facing intraparty criticism that he wasn’t conservative enough and was too slow to fully reopen the state after the pandemic first hit. He has since leaned into hot-button Republican issues over the past year to counter those attacks.

And, earlier this month, Abbott asked the state’s Department of Family and Protective Services to investigate cases of gender-affirming surgical treatments and hormone therapy given to transgender youth, saying such treatment constituted “child abuse.”

The strategy to cover his right flank appears to have worked. Abbott secured the endorsement of former President Donald Trump last year. And buoyed by high name recognition and a massive campaign war chest, he is well positioned to dominate Tuesday’s GOP primary and secure the majority vote needed to avoid a runoff.

A University of Texas/Texas Politics Project poll from last month showed him garnering the support of 60% of registered voters who intend to vote in the Republican primary. Abbott also led O’Rourke 47% to 37% in a hypothetical November matchup, according to the survey.

Abbott — who got his start in Texas politics as a state district judge before serving on the Texas Supreme Court and as state attorney general — launched his campaign last November with a focus on border security and police support.

His campaign stressed that the emphasis on these issues is not a new one for Abbott.

“We’ve been talking about those things for five, four years now,” Carney said.

O’Rourke, who faces only token opposition in the Democratic primary, drew national attention in 2018 when he held Texas GOP Sen. Ted Cruz to a narrow 3-point win. The following year he launched his candidacy for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination but ended up suspending his campaign after eight months.

Abbott’s campaign has accused O’Rourke of flip-flopping and backtracking on comments he made about the southern border, guns and the Green New Deal while running for president in 2020.

Read the fully story here.

When Texas kicks off the 2022 election calendar with its primaries on today, the state will offer the first glimpse at how Democrats are confronting two challenges the party will face across the country this year: a still-raging pandemic forcing tactical changes for the second straight campaign cycle and new laws enacted by Republicans that critics say make it harder for many people to vote.

The Texas primaries include several marquee matchups: Gov. Greg Abbott and state Attorney General Ken Paxton face GOP challengers, while in Laredo, longtime Rep. Henry Cuellar, the most conservative Democrat in the US House, faces a primary rematch with progressive Jessica Cisneros.

But the election today will also serve as a test run for the battles for the governor’s office and several key congressional districts that will play out in the fall. Democratic campaigns and party officials say they are watching closely to see how the restrictive new voting law passed by the Republican-dominated Texas Legislature and signed by Abbott, who is seeking a third term, shapes primary turnout, and how the party can best reach those most directly affected by the law.

Democrats already entered 2022 facing voter anxieties over inflation and the continuing pandemic, and battling the historical trend of first-term presidents seeing their parties battered at the ballot box in midterm elections.

In Texas, though, they face additional challenges: Democratic candidates — who have been more cautious about campaigning during the pandemic than Republicans — were forced into a slow start ahead of the March 1 primary as the Omicron wave made a winter’s worth of campaign events all but impossible. And the new voting law, Democrats say, has made voting by mail — a procedure widely embraced by the party in 2020 — much harder this year.

“There’s already a lack of voter enthusiasm because this year was supposed to feel so much better, and it hasn’t felt better,” said former Austin City Council Member Greg Casar, the progressive front-runner in the Democratic primary for the 35th Congressional District, an open seat that stretches from Austin to San Antonio.

“We are hearing from voters just a lot more unease about what the voting hours are, what the voting location is, what do they need to do to vote. We’re getting a lot more questions,” he said.

Read the full story here.

CNN’s Fredreka Schouten contributed reporting to this post.

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton speaks outside of the US Supreme Court in Washington, DC, in November.

The most hotly contested statewide primary in Texas on Tuesday centers on the future of state Attorney General Ken Paxton, the Republican who spearheaded a notorious failed legal challenge to the 2020 election results and, with a slew of corruption allegations hanging over his campaign, is now facing the prospect of being pushed into a runoff for the GOP nomination.

Recent polling of the race has cast doubt over whether Paxton can win the contest outright, and a chance at a third term in November, in the first primary round. Though he leads the pack, with 47% according to a February survey from the University of Texas at Austin and the Texas Politics Project, Paxton needs a majority on Election Day to avoid being drawn into a one-on-one contest with the runner-up in a heavyweight field of potential runners-up that includes state Land Commissioner George P. Bush, former state Supreme Court Justice Eva Guzman and US Rep. Louie Gohmert.

The campaign has mostly evolved along two tracks: Bush, Guzman and the late-entering Gohmert have sought to chip away at Paxton over his ethics scandals, which include a remarkable episode in 2020 when top lieutenants in his own office leveled allegations of bribery, abuse of office and “other potential criminal offenses” to law enforcement.

Paxton has not been charged and has sought to cast the accusations as sour grapes. But his critics and opponents have warned that a potential indictment in the coming months, along with other lingering legal issues, could endanger Republican hopes of another statewide election sweep. Still, as election day nears, and early voting continues, the challengers have ratcheted up attacks on one another, as they jockey for second place.

Read more about the race here.

Rep. Henry Cuellar speaks during a news conference at the Capitol in Washington, DC, in July.

Rep. Henry Cuellar already faced a difficult rematch in the March 1 Democratic primary against the progressive challenger who nearly defeated him two years ago.

Then the FBI showed up in January to search his home here in Laredo and the building that houses his campaign office.

Though the details of the investigation remain murky as Texas prepares to kick off the 2022 midterm primary calendar with the year’s first contests, Cuellar’s challenger, 28-year-old immigration attorney Jessica Cisneros, has seized on the FBI probe in television advertisements and on the campaign trail.

And progressives, sensing an opening to oust one of the House’s most conservative Democrats in a left-leaning district that the party would be favored to hold in the November general election, have rallied to her side, with Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders endorsing Cisneros and New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez campaigning for her in Texas in recent days.

Cisneros is facing a South Texas political institution in Cuellar, who served first in the state House starting in 1987, then, briefly, as Texas secretary of state in 2001 — appointed by Republican Gov. Rick Perry. He won his seat in Congress in 2004 by narrowly defeating a sitting Democratic lawmaker, Rep. Ciro Rodriguez, in the primary.

But his relationships with Republicans, coziness with corporations and conservative-for-a-Democrat voting record have also angered powerful Democratic groups that have now aligned against him. EMILY’s List, Planned Parenthood, labor unions like the Texas AFL-CIO and others have backed Cisneros. The Latino Victory Fund endorsed Cisneros earlier this month.

Cisneros’ campaign began a new 30-second television ad this month with 20 seconds of compiled news clips about the FBI investigation. Her allies are similarly pouncing: Justice Democrats, a progressive group that backs her candidacy, launched its own spot highlighting the probe. “After 36 years in politics, Cuellar has changed,” the narrator says.

Then there’s the reality that the district lines have slightly shifted since 2020 as a result of redistricting. “Being raided by the FBI probably isn’t a good first impression” for voters who have not lived in Cuellar’s district before, Cisneros said.

Read the full story here.

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott speaks after signing Senate Bill 1 into law in Tyler, Texas, on September 7.

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott signed into law in September a bill that imposed a raft of new restrictions on voting in one of the nation’s fastest-growing and diversifying states.

Today’s primary is the first statewide election in Texas to be conducted under the state’s new restrictive election law.

The law limited early voting hours, eliminated drive-through voting and added new ID requirements for mail voting, among other changes. The changes are already having an impact on voters.  

Here’s a look at some of the changes implemented by the law:

Bans 24-hour voting: In 2020, Harris County, the home of Houston, opened eight locations for around-the-clock early voting — an option that was popular with shift workers in the racially diverse county.

Counties will now be prohibited from offering 24-hour voting by a provision that limits the window in which counties can offer voting to 6 a.m. to 10 p.m.

The law also expands the current requirement of at least 12 hours of early voting on weekdays in the second week it’s allowed to include counties with more than 55,000 residents — up from the current 100,000 cut-off.

Bans drive-thru voting: In another provision that targets Harris County, the law prohibits drive-thru voting. In 2020, as local officials sought ways to safely conduct the election amid the coronavirus pandemic, 127,000 people in the county cast their ballots at 10 drive-thru centers — including a parking garage at the Toyota Center, the home of the NBA’s Houston Rockets.

New vote-by-mail ID mandates: Texans who are voting by mail — those who are over age 65, out of the county on Election Day or have a disability or illness that prevents them from voting in person are eligible — will now need to provide either their driver’s license number or the last four digits of their Social Security number twice: once on their absentee ballot application forms and once on the envelope in which they return their ballots.

Those numbers will then be matched against voters’ records to confirm they are who they say they are — a change from the current signature matching process. Those whose votes are at risk of being rejected because of technical errors can make corrections online under the new law. If time is short, counties can notify voters by phone or email that they can cancel their mail-in ballots and vote in person.

Bans officials from mailing unsolicited mail-in ballot applications: The bill would make it a felony for a public official to send someone a mail-in ballot application the person did not request, or to pre-fill any part of any mail-in ballot application they are sending to someone.

It also prohibits public officials from being able to “facilitate” the unsolicited distribution of absentee ballots by third parties – which means local elections officials cannot provide absentee ballot request forms to get-out-the-vote groups. Political parties can still send unsolicited absentee ballot applications, but will have to pay for them, according to the law.

Harris County tried in 2020 to send an application to each of its registered voters, but the Texas Supreme Court ruled that the state election code did not allow the mailing of unsolicited applications. And some other counties sent an application to all registered voters who were 65 and older by Election Day, the only age group that is automatically eligible to vote by mail in Texas.

Read more about the Texas voting law here and read about voters’ thoughts on the changes here.

CNN’s Ethan Cohen and Melissa DePalo contributed reporting to this post.