WASHINGTON — She didn’t win the election. But Jessica Cisneros, a 26-year-old Laredo immigration attorney, had a message for moderate Democrats like U.S. Rep. Henry Cuellar, who beat her by about 3,000 votes in the hardest-fought campaign of his 15-year congressional career: “This is just the beginning.”

“We are going to keep fighting to create a more progressive and accountable Democratic party this year,” Cisneros vowed during her concession speech on Wednesday. “The fact that we were able to get within 3, 4 points just shows that there’s so many people out there that share the same ideas and beliefs as we do.”

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That’s the message progressives up and down the ballot in Texas sent Tuesday. While they largely fell short on Super Tuesday — especially in Houston, the state’s largest population center where moderates still reign — they outperformed expectations in a state that has been a Republican stronghold for 25 years, where the conventional wisdom for Democrats has long been that a moderate message is best.

"I think the notion that only moderates can be elected in Texas is on shaky ground," said Brandon Rottinghaus, a University of Houston political scientist. "That appetite is there."

Bernie Sanders — an avowed Democratic socialist — pulled in 30 percent of the vote in the presidential primary and will leave Texas with a healthy chunk of its delegates.

Longtime labor organizer Cristina Tzintzún Ramirez, an unabashed progressive campaigning on Medicare For All and the Green New Deal, emerged from a crowded field of Democrats on Wednesday still locked in a tight race to make the runoff in the U.S. Senate primary. And two candidates running to the left of longtime state Sen. Eddie Lucio, Jr. forced him into an unexpected runoff to hold onto his Brownsville district.

For subscribers: Emboldened Democrats say it’s a myth progressives can’t take Texas

“There was an active sense that this was a heat check that was really amplified by the upswing in Sanders’ support that we saw in the run-up to the election,” said Jim Henson, director of Texas Politics Project at the University of Texas at Austin.

“It’s meaningful that Bernie Sanders got the significant share of the vote here that he did in a Democratic primary in a multi-candidate race,” Henson said. “And there is clearly a constituency that is growing in the Democratic party that requires a more sophisticated look at the Democratic electorate in Texas than most people have been taking for the last generation.”

As of February, just 27 percent of Democratic voters in Texas identified as moderate, according to University of Texas/Texas Tribune polling data that has been collected since 2008 when more than 50 percent considered themselves moderate.

Meanwhile, younger Latinos are more likely to identify as progressive, and are more likely to say they’ll support progressive candidates. A recent University of Houston/Univision poll found strong support among Latinos for key planks of the progressive movement, such as Medicare For All. A growing share of Latino respondents said they were "certain to vote," with 73 percent saying it was "more important" to vote in 2020 than it was in 2016.

Sanders carried about 40 percent of the Latino vote in Texas, according to exit polls, and more than 60 percent of the youth vote. But voters under 30 were just 15 percent of those who turned out in the Democratic primary in Texas, according to those same polls.

Progressives saw big boosts in some of the state’s biggest counties, including Travis and Bexar, both of which went for Sanders.

But they still have at least one big problem: Houston, one of the state’s core economic engines, driven in large part by the oil and gas industry that progressive candidates have pitted themselves against.

For subscribers: Who won and lost in Harris County elections on Super Tuesday 2020

Sanders, a Green New Deal supporter who has vowed to ban fracking, lost by nearly 10 percentage points to former Vice President Joe Biden in Harris County, where election day voting helped vault Biden beyond Sanders statewide.

Moderates dominated the Senate race in Harris County, as well. Former Air Force pilot MJ Hegar took the top spot, with the second place split by former Houston congressman Chris Bell and former Houston City Councilwoman Amanda Edwards — both of whom took donations from the fossil fuel industry that they promised to work with, if elected.

Tzintzún Ramirez, who campaigned on the Green New Deal, drew just 6 percent in Harris County. Her strong performance in Bexar and Travis counties, meanwhile, has her locked in a close race with longtime state Sen. Royce West for the second spot in a runoff with Hegar.

“Harris is so big and includes so much of a land mass that people see the need to moderate views because there are so many perspectives,” Rottinghaus said.

“It’s also a city that is driven primarily by industry and has a significant economic footprint in a bunch of different fields that needs to be part of how Democrats talk about Texas’ economic future,” he said. “Oil and gas is a big one.”

There’s also the possibility that with President Donald Trump at the top of the ticket, some Democrats who might favor progressive policies were instead seeking a more moderate voice as the candidate most likely to beat Trump.

“I think they’re all running their own personal algorithms between those issues right now,” said Sherri Greenberg, a former state representative and a professor at the University of Texas at Austin’s LBJ School of Public Affairs. “Do I want a steady hand? Am I more concerned with a policy like health care? Do I want someone with a a history of getting things done?”

Still, progressives say the primary showed a path forward.

“There are hundreds of thousands of people who went to the polls in Texas yesterday and voted for populist progressives,” said Zack Malitz, a Democratic consultant and veteran of Beto O’Rourke’s 2018 Senate campaign, who advised Tzintzún Ramirez’s campaign this cycle. “They voted for the Green New Deal, they voted for Medicare For All, they voted to take on big banks.”

“It’s really clear that progressives both need to fight to win more voters, but also that, if you’re a Democrat, a progressive Democrat, thinking about whether to primary your member of Congress or your city council member or run for an open seat — there’s clearly a constituency of Texas Democrats that will support you.”

ben.wermund@chron.com