Takeaways from the Texas Primary: Ken Paxton drives away some of his enemies

Texas’ primaries on Tuesday were among the most expensive and hard-fought elections in the state’s history as factions of the Republican Party battled for control.

It was in large part a referendum on the fate of moderate Republicans in the Texas House, which ousted the Republican attorney general last year and blocked a number of hard-right priorities.

And as in other parts of the country, many of those Republicans fell prey Tuesday to challengers who were decidedly partisan and aligned with former President Donald J. Trump.

With key races like that of speaker of the Texas House headed to a runoff, Tuesday’s vote underscored the continued power of the Republican base to punish incumbents in the party seen as insufficiently conservative.

“It’s Republicans who said they were conservative and then didn’t keep their word to voters,” Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, who has endorsed several challengers, said in an interview late Tuesday in Orange, Texas.

“The Band-Aid is off now,” he added. “From now on, they will be held accountable for their voting behavior.”

Here are four themes that emerged Tuesday.

Attorney General Ken Paxton demanded political revenge.

The Texas House impeached Mr. Paxton last year. Immediately after his acquittal in the Senate, in a trial led by Mr. Patrick, Mr. Paxton vowed retaliation.

He was supported in his efforts by a pair of religiously conservative West Texas billionaires, Tim Dunn and Farris Wilks, who have long spent significant sums on Texas politics and contributed nearly $4 million during the primaries.

Although not all of the many candidates he supported won, Mr. Paxton had reason to celebrate on Tuesday.

He helped Texas House Speaker Dade Phelan win a runoff election on May 28 against a new candidate, David Covey. According to Mr. Patrick, the lieutenant governor and ally of Mr. Paxton, who has had a bitter feud with Mr. Phelan, this was the only time this had happened in 52 years.

Mr. Paxton also set his sights on reforming the Court of Criminal Appeals, whose elected judges are all Republicans. He opposed three incumbents, criticizing them for their part in an 8-to-1 decision that found Mr. Paxton could not unilaterally prosecute criminal voter fraud cases without the involvement of local prosecutors.

Mr. Paxton has been among the more aggressive state officials in backing Mr. Trump’s claims of voter fraud. After the 2020 presidential election, he challenged Trump’s loss in court, an effort that was ultimately rejected by the US Supreme Court.

In Tuesday’s elections, two of the three Paxton-backed candidates for judge defeated Republican incumbents by wide margins, and a third was on his way to victory. If they emerge victorious in the November general election against Democratic opponents, the outcome will likely send a signal to the right that the party’s base could be mobilized against them.

“You see people vote when they’re angry,” said James Pressler, a Republican consultant who has worked on several primary campaigns. Some of those targeted, he said, “paid a price for doing what they thought was right.”

School vouchers moved closer to a reality in Texas.

Republican Governor Greg Abbott scored several victories in his aggressive statewide campaign for private school vouchers.

While vouchers are generally popular among conservative Republicans, the issue is more complicated in rural Texas, where public schools and their sports teams are an important anchor to local economies and public life.

Several Republicans were reluctant to spend public money on private schools, and many of them were targeted by the governor during their re-election bids. And not just Mr. Abbott: The pro-voucher campaign drew support from national advocates of voucher programs, including a $6 million contribution from a Pennsylvania billionaire, the largest in Texas history, and the Club for Growth, an influential conservative anti-tax group. which spent nearly $4 million, mostly on television advertising.

Those efforts seemed to pay off. In 14 races where Mr. Abbott or the Club for Growth spent a lot of money on it, only two established players emerged victorious on Tuesday. The others lost or were headed to a second round.

“The political message is that you can’t call yourself a conservative if you’re against school choice,” said David McIntosh, president of the group. “If this is successful in Texas, we believe it will have a major impact across the country.”

The Democrats chose a candidate to challenge Ted Cruz and thus avoid a runoff.

Colin Allred, a Dallas-area congressman and former professional football player, handily defeated a crowded field to win the Democratic primary for U.S. Senate. He will face Senator Ted Cruz in November.

Allred’s biggest challenger was Sen. Roland Gutierrez, who waged an aggressive, angry campaign on the issue of gun control and the deadly 2022 school shooting in Uvalde, Texas.

In the end, it was Mr. Allred’s promises of bipartisanship and the ability to work with Republicans in Washington that won the day — and he raised far more money than anyone else.

“I want every Texan to know,” Mr. Allred said in his victory speech on Tuesday, “that whether you are a Democrat, an independent or a Republican, I want to be involved in this campaign, and I want to serve. you in the United States Senate.”

In Houston, a Democratic district attorney failed by an astonishingly large margin.

Kim Ogg, the Democratic district attorney in Harris County, lost by about 50 percentage points to a new candidate who challenged her from the left. It was an unusually emphatic defeat for a politician seeking her third term.

Ms. Ogg was elected in 2016, the first time in decades that a Democrat became district attorney in Houston, and she was seen as part of a wave of progressive prosecutors winning elections across the country. But over time, she angered many Democrats, who said she had failed to implement reforms to the criminal justice system that many in the party had hoped for.

Critics also accused her office of attacking fellow Republicans and working with Republicans to undermine the county’s popular top executive, U.S. District Judge Lina Hidalgo.

While some progressive district attorneys across the country faced setbacks over rising crime, Democratic activists in Houston mobilized opposition from the left, and Ms. Ogg lost to a former prosecutor in her office, Sean Teare.

Mr Teare pledged to reduce penalties for low-level offenses while aggressively prosecuting violent offenders.