Takeaways from the March 3 primary election in El Paso
Diego Mendoza-Moyers: Hey everyone – we’re back.
I’m Diego Mendoza-Moyers, a reporter with El Paso Matters. And for the last couple of months, I’ve been out on leave, instead of podcasting or writing. I’m planning to talk more about that in another episode to come in the near future. But I’ll just say that lately, I’ve been changing a lot of diapers, filling a lot of baby bottles and doing my part to fix El Paso’s sagging population trends. At least a tiny bit.
But while I was out, we saw almost 18% of registered voters in El Paso turn out to vote in the primary midterm election last week.
Nearly 93,000 El Pasoans hit the polls last week, compared with about 57,000 votes cast in El Paso last time there was a midterm primary election in 2022.
Amid the jump in voter turnout, longtime incumbent officials like County Commissioners David Stout and Sergio Coronado lost their races against new candidates. At the federal level, El Paso could gain a new congressional representative after Tony Gonzales resigned from the race amid a major scandal involving an affair with a former aide who later died by suicide. And Texas could have a new face representing the state in the U.S. Senate as well.
In just a moment, I’m going to welcome El Paso Matters CEO Bob Moore onto the podcast to talk through last week’s election results and the upshot at the local and national levels.
Why did voters kick two relatively long-serving county commissioners out of office? What does the increase in voter turnout this election indicate, if anything? And what should we all be keeping an eye on ahead of the midterm elections in November?
But before I talk with Bob, I want to mention that this El Paso Matters Podcast episode is brought to you by our podcast title sponsor, Tawney, Acosta and Chaparro, truck crash and injury attorneys. Their team of local, seasoned trial attorneys are ready to help if you’ve been injured in a crash.
And you can sign up for El Paso Matters’ free newsletter and read our reporting at our website, elpasomatters.org.
Now, onto our conversation.
Diego: Bob, thanks for joining me. It’s been a little while.
Bob: Yeah, welcome back. Glad to have you here.
Diego: So, Bob, let’s just get into it. What were your biggest takeaways from the results of last week’s midterm primary election here in El Paso? And just wondering if anything really surprised you?
Bob: The turnout is the biggest surprise. So, we wound up with about 93,000 voters. And just for context, the biggest turnout we’d ever had in a midterm primary before was in 2018, where we had 68,000. So, you’re talking about a jump of 25,000 voters in this election. And it was so large that it surpassed a lot of presidential primary election years.
So, there was deep interest in this race in both parties. It really got down to, like, what are Texas voters saying about what they want from their candidates and their political parties? Different answers for the two different parties, but both of them asking that same question.
ELECTION RESULTS: How El Pasoans voted in the March 3 primary elections
Diego: Yeah. So, I’ll just touch on the Senate race. It seems like you think that’s a big driver of the turnout, right, was the fact that we had, on the Republican side, John Cornyn against the current Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton and some other candidates as well, but those two big names. And then on the Democratic side, the former state Rep. James Talarico against Jasmine Crockett.
Bob: Still state Rep. James Talarico. Don’t want to brush him out of office.
Diego: Pardon me. You’re right. I guess, I’m just curious, particularly on that race, what you thought of the results in El Paso and the fact that El Paso Democrats supported Talarico. Did that indicate anything to you?
Bob: When put in context with what was happening elsewhere in Texas, we learned a lot. There are 21 counties, I think, where Hispanics make up more than 75% of the population. And in 20 of those counties, Tallarico carried the county. So, his margin of victory was clearly provided by Hispanic voters. So, he resonated with Hispanic voters. He also won in counties that were majority white.
And Jasmine Crockett did very well in counties that were majority black. But when you — and I got to talk to both candidates during the election, and I observed what everybody did who followed the campaign. And on the issues, not much difference between them. They’re kind of aligned. So, it really was a difference in tone more than anything else.
Jasmine Crockett was a “punch Trump in the mouth” kind of candidate.
Talarico aligned with a lot of the issues behind that, but had more of a kind of an open tent approach that he believes that the path to him winning involves convincing a lot of people that voted for President Trump in 2024 to vote for him this time.
Crockett’s argument was “We just need to get a lot more people who believe in what we believe out to the polls.” And so she was trying to excite the base. And there are pros and cons to both arguments.
Ultimately, Democratic voters in Texas decided that Tallerico was the guy they wanted to be their standard bearer.
Diego: Any thoughts on the outcome of the Republican primary Senate race as well, Bob? We know that Ken Paxton and John Cornyn are going to be going to a runoff in May, but just curious if you had any takeaways from that race as well?
Bob: Yeah, I think statewide, the big story for Cornyn is he came in first place. I think there was a lot of expectation or anxiety, depending on where you fell in that race, that Cornyn was going to finish second, maybe even a distant second to Ken Paxton. So, he wound up first by a couple of points. It was a close race, but neither one of them got to 50%.
In El Paso, as in most major cities, Cornyn carried those counties. Paxton did extremely well in more rural counties and then the suburban counties that kind of have a mixed picture there.
Diego: Interesting. And I want to talk about a couple of local races. But first, just curious to talk briefly about the congressional races here in El Paso.
We know our current congressional representative, Veronica Escobar, will be going into a race in November and then Tony Gonzales — he’s represented a small portion of El Paso, so he’s out of the race after a pretty serious scandal. And potentially will be replaced on the Republican side by Brandon Herrera, the “AK guy”. Just curious if you can talk just a little bit about those two races and maybe how you expect them to play out in November?
CONGRESSIONAL PRIMARY: GOP District 23 primary race heads to runoff; Demo candidate wins outright
Bob: Yeah, so important to note that the Republican race for the 16th Congressional District, which is Congresswoman Escobar’s district, is headed to a runoff featuring Adam Bauman, who’s a Navy vet, former Border Patrol guy, against Manny Barraza, who, where should we begin? Former Democrat, former judge, former attorney, disbarred attorney, convicted felon. He was convicted of essentially extorting sexual favors from people in his court back in the 1990s. Republican voters in El Paso decided to make him the second choice in this. In their eyes, I’m not sure what’s the worst sin, that he’s a former Democrat or that he’s a convicted felon.
My guess is there may not have been deep awareness. And we saw this on a lot of races up and down the ballot, and we could talk more. One artifact of that really high turnout is you had all these people who are coming to vote in their Senate primary, whether it was Democratic or Republican, and then they start going down the ballot, and it’s like “I don’t know any of these names. And so I think I know that guy.” And so you had some odd outcomes. I think Manny Barraza finishing second in the Republican primary is probably the oddest of them. So, one of those two will emerge to take on Congresswoman Escobar in November, and they will be facing some amazing history.
CONGRESSIONAL PRIMARY: Republicans Adam Bauman, Manuel Barraza head to primary runoff in District 16 Congressional race
So, basically, since the end of Reconstruction, which was the end of the Republican era in Texas after the Civil War, a Republican has represented El Paso’s primary congressional district for a grand total of two years in that 100-and-some years of history. And that was a gentleman named Ed Forman, who was elected in a midterm in 1962 when John Kennedy was president.
And, as often happens in midterms, the party out of power does really well. So, Republicans in Texas were just emerging as a force. So, Ed Foreman wins that race. Two years later, he’s defeated by a guy named Richard White, moves to New Mexico, winds up getting elected to southern New Mexico’s congressional seat. So, he’s one of the few people in U.S. history to represent two different states in the House of Representatives.
But that’s the only time Republicans have won, that period between 1962 and 1964. So, a lot of history. I think Republicans built up some optimism after the 2024 election. For the first time since she was elected back in 2018, Congresswoman Escobar got less than 60% of the vote. Not a lot less, but a little bit less. And I think that and a couple of other races kind of encouraged Republicans that they may be making some inroads. There are some reasons to doubt that will continue this year.
So, there’s all that history running against them. So, that’s the 16th.
The 23rd, for a lot of reasons, is probably a much more interesting race, even though only about less than 10% of El Paso residents are in that district.
Diego: Yeah, and so it seems like Veronica Escobar probably will be favored to win that race against whoever wins the runoff in that election.
But yeah, so, in the race to replace Tony Gonzales, we’ve got Katie Padilla Stout on the Democratic side. Curious if you can tell us anything about her? And she’ll be running against Brandon Herrera, who is kind of a gun enthusiast, YouTuber, a little bit provocative, right, on the Republican side. Any information on those two candidates?
Bob: Just basically what Pablo Villa, who’s our reporter covering that race, developed through interviews and things like that, especially with Katie Padilla Stout. She’s a new persona in the district. She’s not run for office before.
Usually, Washington divides the congressional map into competitive districts and everything else. And the 23rd district in Texas for a number of years has been in that “everything else” category, meaning that the Republicans had so many built-in advantages that the Democrats never went out and tried to recruit a candidate.
So, they didn’t this time, but they had several people who kind of raised their hand and said, “Why not me? And I want to run.” And Katie Padilla Stout was one of them. She’s a former educator, but I believe doesn’t have any elective office experience. But in a crowded Democratic primary, she emerged with more than 50% of the vote, which is pretty interesting in and of itself.
Also worth noting, she got more votes in her primary than either Herrera or Gonzales did in the Republican primary. So, again, this sign of Democratic enthusiasm that we’re seeing. So, one of the questions that we’ll see heading into the fall is: is this a race where national Democrats may want to reconsider their earlier decision not to get involved financially?
Diego: Yeah, and basically, “Hey, let’s go ahead and try to invest in this very large district that runs along the border,” right?
Bob: And because of that, it’s very expensive, too, because it’s in multiple media markets. So geographically, it’s hard to navigate. And in terms of media buys, you have to buy the San Antonio market, the El Paso market, and maybe a couple of the smaller markets. So logistically, it’s a hard thing to jump into.
Diego: Yeah. It goes without saying, but it’s hard to not find it odd that part of El Paso and a part of San Antonio are in the same district.
Bob: Yeah, it’s 500 miles apart. And it is also worth noting, back in the redistricting efforts last year, Tony Gonzales had tried again to get Fort Bliss and the El Paso airport into his district, and El Paso once again sort of beat it back. But there was a little shift in the boundaries.
So, Horizon City, which is a growing metropolis out in the eastern part of the county is now in the 23rd Congressional district. It had been in the 16th until then. So, they may — voters out there could play an important role coming up. Horizon City, we know from some reporting Cindy Ramirez and I did, traditionally Democratic stronghold actually flipped to Republican in 2024. So, can Democrats start to peel some of those votes back?
But the race really becomes about Brandon Herrera at this point. It was about Tony Gonzales. I’m sure everybody’s kind of familiar with the background, but Tony Gonzales was accused of, later confessed to, having an affair with a staffer. And it got so bad that the leadership of the Republican Party in the House said, “Tony, time to go. Just don’t go right away, Tony. We need you to stick around for the rest of this year.” So they said, Tony, “Don’t run for reelection, but don’t resign.” And the reason for that is the Republicans have this razor-thin margin in the House where right now they only have a one or two vote margin that they can lose. And so, they can’t lose Tony Gonzales right now because it may make it difficult for them to pass legislation the remainder of the year.
So, it’s an interesting point where it’s like, “Oh my God, what a horrible sin.” And it is. It’s a horrible thing when you have an employer who has all this power imbalance having a romantic relationship with somebody under their control. Horrible, horrible thing. But not horrible enough to leave office right now in the eyes of the Republican leadership.
So, Gonzales said, “Yes, I’ll step aside.” And that leaves – he and Brandon Herrera were supposed to be in a runoff. Herrera narrowly finished first in that race after narrowly losing to Gonzalez in the runoff in 2025.
So now, this YouTuber known as the AK guy, who has said outrageous things at times, and his defense to that is, “Hey, I’m kind of a comedian, so it’s okay for me to say” —
Diego: I think he was showing off his copy of Mein Kampf.
Bob: Yeah, I guess we can all agree that that’s funny. Maybe not.
So, that creates some opportunities for Democrats to make some inroads in a district that really, under normal circumstances, would probably tilt 15 points toward the Republican side. So, it remains to be seen.
You also could make the argument that Herrera is more aligned with the Republican base in that district than Gonzales was. The reason Gonzales almost lost the primary two years ago is because a lot of voters out there saw him as insufficiently conservative. And he had a very conservative voting record, which he pointed out. So, the base in the Republican party may be perfectly happy to have Herrera out there.
And so again, he faces the same challenges the Democrats do. Big district geographically, can he get out there and define himself for voters before somebody else does it for him? And Stout will face the same thing in her primary. Because I’m sure the Republicans will go scouring for things about her. The one advantage she has, she doesn’t have a YouTube channel. So not a lot of video out there, and she doesn’t have an elected voting record. So that makes her a little more of a blank slate, which could be an advantage for her. Or it could be a big disadvantage, because the other side’s going to rush in to try to define her too.
Diego: Yeah. And that’s going to be a really interesting race. I appreciate the context of sort of the national situation with the margin in Congress being thin and so forth.
OK, so on to some of the local races, Bob. There were some important local races, and we saw the primary for the county judge and for county commissioners. Which, just for listeners who may be a little less familiar, the County Commissioners Court is sort of like the city council of the county.
Bob: But with a lot less power.
Diego: Yeah, but still, important positions, right? And so a couple of the relatively long-serving incumbents, David Stout and Sergio Coronado, both Democrats, actually lost their primaries. And I’ve heard some people message me and say, “I’m surprised about this,” and heard those whispers of, “Wow, I didn’t expect this to happen.”
I guess I just wonder if you have any thoughts on what led to the losses of these two incumbents and maybe what it indicates for the future elections?
Bob: Yeah, and especially with David Stout, who’d been in office for 12 years, that may have been a weakness rather than a strength. I think you can wear out your welcome with voters after a while.
But I do think with both Stout and Sergio Coronado, they were in races with relatively unknown opponents. And I think you can label the results of this election incumbent versus non-incumbent in both of them without having to put any names in there.
The incumbents had a couple of things weighing them down. One is taxes. Over the last couple of years, after several years of kind of holding the line on property taxes, the Commissioners Court raised county property taxes on a couple of occasions. And then I think as controversial, or maybe more so, they also voted to increase their pay. Which is just not a good look. And you can make all kinds of arguments about why we should pay elected officials better. It’s not an argument that’s never going to be a winner with the public.
So, you have these guys who have made these controversial votes. But they’re just, I think, they wind up being kind of representative of something much bigger. And so we hear a lot of conversation nationally about affordability as this buzzword. And it’s more than a buzzword. It’s something that people feel kind of in their gut that it’s getting more and more expensive for me to live, to take care of my family.
Diego: Buy a home.
Bob: Buy a home, send my kids to a nice college, whatever the case may be. In some cases just feeding my family, right? The cost of food is going up. Right now, we have the cost of gasoline going up. So, you have all of these pressures on people.
But I think two things really have sort of become the exemplars of what El Pasoans are talking about when they talk about affordability. One is property taxes. They have gone up in recent years, even though the state took some measures to reduce the amount of school property taxes. Many El Pasoans are now paying more in property taxes than they did two years ago, four years ago. And that worries them, because if they’re spending money on property taxes, they’re not buying food for their family. They’re not saving that money, whatever the case may be. So that’s issue one.
Issue two, especially in terms of this election, happened sort of simultaneously with the election, and that’s all of these rate increases on utilities that come into play. Worth noting, county commissioners have zero role in any of this, right? But voters don’t necessarily nuance things that way. They’re just saying, “My property taxes are going up, my electric bill’s going up, my gas bill’s going up, my water bill’s going up, I’m drowning here, and I don’t feel like anybody’s listening to me.”
The Democratic primary for these two county commissioner races, I think, turns out to be the public’s first opportunity to have their say on these affordability issues. And the people that they could have their say on are these two incumbents in those races. And I think that’s what happened.
Diego: And maybe bolstering that argument is the fact that the people they lost to are relatively newcomers as far as politics, right? I mean, I think Miguel Teran maybe has a little bit of experience –
Bob: In a water district. And his father was a county commissioner.
Diego: Yeah. But Annette Griego, who beat Sergio Coronado, seems to be kind of a newbie to the political world, I guess. And so it’s not as if their opponents had a really extensive record to run on. It’s more like the incumbents just kind of — voters weren’t satisfied with them anymore.
Bob: Yeah. Griego’s biggest advantage was she was not Sergio Coronado. Miguel Teran’s biggest advantage was he was not David Stout.
Diego: Yeah. So those were interesting outcomes.
So as far as the county judge race, Bob, we know the Democratic incumbent Ricardo Samaniego, he’s going to be facing the Republican Minerva Torres Shelton in November. Just curious what you can tell us about that race. She’s not a newcomer to politics in El Paso, right?
Bob: Yeah, she ran for sheriff two years ago and was one of those candidates I was referencing earlier that did much better than Republicans usually do and gave Republicans some hope for the future. So, she ran for sheriff against Oscar Ugarte and wound up around 42%, 43% of the vote, which is very high by Republican standards. She has a law enforcement background. We all know that El Pasoans really respect people with law enforcement backgrounds. And so she wins the Republican primary by pretty much a landslide. So, now she wins the opportunity to take on Ricardo Samaniego again, two-term county judge, been around for a while.
READ MORE: Minerva Torres Shelton wins Republican nomination for county judge
Diego: Led the city through COVID, right? That’s kind of his big thing, right?
Bob: Yeah, and I think there are some people who are bringing up some things that happened there against him on the Republican side. So, again, one of these issues that never kind of goes away.
And so we mentioned earlier the history in the congressional race. As far as I know, since the time of Reconstruction, there has never been a Republican who’s been county judge in El Paso, which is the top elected rank in El Paso County government. So, there’s a lot weighing against Minerva Torres Shelton in this race, all that history. She’s a Republican on the ballot in a midterm election where you have a president of her party who is not particularly popular.
So, those things would always kind of suggest she doesn’t have a chance. I don’t think that’s the case this year. For the reasons we were talking about earlier, I think she can run a campaign that basically says “Ricardo Samaniego is the face of the affordability problem here. He hasn’t done enough to stand up for us.” I’m not saying that’ll be totally sufficient, because I do think that partisan weight in a midterm election could be somewhat problematic.
But I think Ricardo Samaniego and all of the City Council incumbents who are going to be on the ballot in November are going to be facing these same frustrations from voters around these affordability issues.
And in the case of City Council, they do have something to do with electric rates and gas rates. Not a lot, but something to do with it. But when people are frustrated that they can’t save money, that they can’t afford to buy a new pair of shoes or whatever, they’re going to take it out on whoever’s available. And I think incumbents have to be very prepared in the fall to be able to address those affordability issues in a genuine way to people and not in a condescending way. And the one thing that they can’t say is, “Look, it’s not my fault, no matter what you think.” They’re going to have to figure out other ways to approach these issues.
Diego: Yeah, and we see those kinds of moves, like City Council taking almost ceremonial votes to, like, for example, reject El Paso Electric’s rate increase, when really the City Council isn’t the body that approves or denies it. It’s the Public Utility Commission. But you’ve seen the maybe messaging or approach from the elected officials in the city like, “Hey, let’s adamantly get out there and look like we’re rejecting cost increases in whatever way we can, whether it’s effective or not.” So, it’s interesting. I think there is a sensitivity to the affordability issue you’re talking about.
Bob: Yeah, and that’s the only tool they have is for this symbolic protest. And so they can at least say “We tried to stand up for you.”
Diego: Sure. And I guess just this last thing here, Bob. It’s interesting to think about – here we are in March of 2026. We’ve got international conflict in Iran, right, and surging gas prices and all these various issues. The artificial intelligence frenzy and anxiety and all that. It’ll be interesting to see where we’re at in November. We could be in a totally different environment where maybe these factors aren’t even at play, right?
Bob: Yeah, or at play in different ways. And I’m glad you mentioned artificial intelligence, because you’ve written a lot about data centers. And now that we have you back, you’re going to write a lot more about it.
But I think that issue ties into the affordability issue in a way that people may not be vocalizing right now, but they are concerned. They’ve just been told their gas bills and their water bills and their electric bills are going to go up. Some people actually kind of assume that it’s because of those data centers. But the truth is, as you know, these rate increases are for things that already happened in the past. The real impact of the data center is yet to come, so we have to understand what that might be.
Again, there are a lot of environmental issues and things like that, climate change issues that come into play. But at its heart, I think the public angst about the data center really comes down to this affordability issue, too.
Diego: Yeah. And I think the perception of our elected officials — or do we have elected officials willing to push back against corporate power or whatever? I do think that’s going to be an animating factor in November. The interesting thing is, yeah, the rate increases now aren’t really tied to data centers. But these utilities have billions more in investment planned for the years ahead, and we could see data center impacts maybe later this year and in future years.
Bob: And I think people are really worried about that, and it’s that unknown that is really, really scary. And it should be.
Diego: Yeah, I think that’ll play a role in November for sure is the data centers.
Anyways, we’ll leave it there, Bob. I don’t want to take up more of your time. I appreciate you kind of breaking down all these races and giving us a little history about maybe what Republicans will be facing as they kind of seek some additional offices in November.
Bob: Elections are my Christmas. I mean, that’s how I have fun. So I appreciate the opportunity to talk about it.
Diego: Sounds good. Talk soon, Bob.
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