Democratic turnout soared in America’s most populous Republican state on Tuesday as Texas held the nation’s first primary elections before November’s midterms.

The Texas primaries were scrutinized across the country for hints as to whether revulsion over Donald Trump and the rightwards swing of the GOP could translate into a flurry of Democratic enthusiasm that gives the party a chance of retaking the House of Representatives in November.

One of the country’s most solidly conservative states is an acid test for the “blue wave”: no Democrat has won a statewide election in Texas since 1994. However, in early voting, Democratic turnout doubled from 2014 and outstripped the Republican total, according to state figures from the 15 counties with the most registered voters.

Beto O’Rourke, an El Paso congressman seeking to oust Ted Cruz from the US Senate, won the Democratic nomination with a campaign that has gathered momentum and raised significant funds.

“They are mobilizing in a powerful way,” Cruz told CBS’s Dallas affiliate. “At the end of the day, the good news is that there are a lot more conservatives in Texas than there are liberals.”

In a sign that the early burst of Democratic energy may struggle to overcome entrenched Republican dominance in the long run, Republicans gained ground on election day itself. Cruz ultimately won more than twice as many votes as O’Rourke, and the total number of Democratic voters was about 1 million compared with 1.5 million Republicans.

Even in a state that was relatively lukewarm towards Trump in the 2016 election, embracing the president proved more asset than liability for George P Bush. In a bid for re-election as land commissioner, which centered on the preservation of the Alamo site, Bush faced a stiff challenge from fellow Republican Jerry Patterson, a gun-toting former marine who once described the former Texas governor – and current US energy secretary – Rick Perry as resembling a “west coast metrosexual” when he stopped wearing cowboy boots.

But the son of Jeb Bush, nephew of George W Bush and grandson of George HW Bush easily held off Patterson to keep the family dynasty politically alive – after touting his support of Trump during his campaign, with the president returning the favour in a Twitter endorsement.



In the race for governor, Lupe Valdez, the former sheriff of Dallas county,

faces a runoff with Andrew White, the son of former Texas governor Mark White. The eventual Democratic candidate faces a tough task against the popular and well-funded Republican incumbent, Greg Abbott.

On a night in which women enjoyed notable successes, two Hispanic women, Sylvia Garcia and Veronica Escobar, won primaries in heavily Democratic districts and are likely in November to become the first Latina congresswomen from Texas. And a congressional Democratic hopeful who was castigated by her national party secured a runoff election.

In an echo of the intra-party conflict between progressive and more centrist factions that split the Democrats in 2016, when Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton vied for the presidential nomination, Laura Moser, a writer and activist, will face off against Lizzie Pannill Fletcher, a lawyer, on 22 May, after no Democratic candidate for Texas’s seventh district won more than 50% of the vote.

“A lot of people in the state aren’t even in a party, they’re independents, so I think the fact that I’m sort of outside the box will help me,” Moser told the Guardian at a boisterous watch party in Houston.

“I think that the people who will win up and down the ballot this year are going to be people who stand for, and by, their values, and I think it’s going to be like an existential moment for national Democrats. We’ve got to stand for something.”

Political campaign signs stand outside a polling station in Austin, Texas Monday. Photograph: Reuters Staff/Reuters

Texas’ seventh congressional district will be one of the most followed races nationally. Covering large swaths of Houston’s wealthy western suburbs, it has been reliably Republican since 1966, when George HW Bush, the former president, won the seat. He is a current resident.

The incumbent, John Culberson, is a staunch conservative who took office in 2001. Eight years later, as the “birther” movement questioning Barack Obama’s citizenship gathered pace, he co-sponsored a bill that would have required future presidential candidates to prove their American citizenship.

Yet the district narrowly plumped for Clinton ahead of Donald Trump in the 2016 presidential election, seemingly putting it in play for 2018.

Moser is a writer and activist who grew up in Houston and launched Daily Action, an anti-Trump resistance group, after the 2016 presidential election. Her husband, Arun Chaudhary, was the videographer for the Obama White House.

Evidently believing that Moser is too progressive to win in November, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee issued a statement in February replete with the sort of negative research that might have been expected to come from one of her opponents.

It described Moser as “a Washington insider” and referred to a magazine article from 2014 in which she wrote that she would “sooner have my teeth pulled out without anesthesia” than move to the small town of Paris, Texas. The statement misleadingly implied this was because she did not want to live in Texas, though the piece was about the pros and cons of big-city life.

Rather than ruin Moser, the attention boosted her fundraising: her campaign picked up donations at a far higher rate than before.