Hey there. It's the NPR Politics Podcast. I'm Miles Parks. I cover voting. I'm Tamara Keith. I cover the White House. And I'm Domenico Montanaro, senior political editor and correspondent. And it's Friday. So we wanted to wrap up another week in Washington and Beyond. And we're going to start with the Beyond in Texas specifically, which is coming into focus after voting last week in primary elections.

And Domenico, you have been crunching some really interesting numbers from the Texas primary on turnout.

What can you tell us?

Yeah, Democrats set a turnout record in their primary, not just for Democratic statewide primaries, but for any statewide primary, including Republicans, and we know Republicans have dominated in the state for a long time.

More than 2.3 million votes were cast in the primary that pitted state representative James Tala Rico against Congresswoman Jasmine Crockett.

Obviously, two viral candidates.

There was a big following for each of them.

You know, competitive primaries certainly lead to higher turnout. The only two primaries that have

taken place in the state that had more turnout were the 2008 presidential primaries featuring

Barack Obama against Hillary Clinton in that prolonged race and the 2016 Republican

presidential race, which of course Ted Cruz won against Donald Trump and Marco Rubio and a whole

slew of other Republicans who are pretty well known. What was interesting here, too, is it's not just

the total number of Democrats who participate in the Democratic primary and the total number

of Republicans, which is a notable number, but you also got into some of the geography here. Can you tell us about that?

Well, I think this is so key because Latinos have really turned into a swing group in Texas in particular.

And there's a whole bunch of things that are going along with the strength of the Latino vote in South Texas, what it's meant to presidential elections, what it could mean for redistricting.

And Democrats clearly look like they have some momentum with Latinos again.

As Trump did very well in the 2024 presidential election. He had a record for a Republican with the

percentage of Latinos that he won over almost half, according to exit polls. In this one,

what I decided to do was take the top 10 most populous districts that also had at least 50%

Latino representation, according to the 2020 census.

And what I found there, those top 10 counties, on average, there was 126% increase in the

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