This is Austin Smith, recording in Austin, Texas, where I'm waiting to vote in the primaries.

This podcast was recorded that...

12.41 PM on Wednesday, March 7th.

Things will likely have changed by the time you listen to this.

Keep up with all of NPR's political coverage at npr.org, the NPR-1 app, or your local public radio station.

All right, here's the show.

Hey there, this is the NPR Politics Podcast, and we are here, in your ears, to talk about the

first primary of the 2018 political season. That was in Texas. And three quick things to know.

About a million Democrats turned out to vote, and about a million and a half Republicans.

Finally, the women running for Congress did really well last night. So how much can we read

into the Texas results? What does it tell us about future primaries? And what we might see in November?

I'm a small political reporter. I'm Susan Davis, I cover Congress, and I'm Dominican Montenoro,

political editor. All right, I want to begin by just phoning a friend. Can we dial in Ben

Phil Pot? He covers politics for the NPR station in Austin, Texas at KUT. Hey Ben.

Hello. Hey, how's it going? It's great. You are our resident Texas expert, so I so appreciate

you joining us. All right, folks, I just want to dive in actually by beginning to talk about turnout.

I feel that for days and days, we had been hearing about record Democratic turnout in the

early voting numbers that we saw. But then, priority comes, and it seems like actually more Republicans

showed up. So, I mean, do you mean to go what happened there? Well, there are a lot of Republicans in

Texas. So, you know, I mean, there's, there's a, there's all this attention about a blue wave,

and all that, and all this attention on Beto Aurora, who's the Congressman from the El Paso

area. He's running for the Senate against Ted Cruz. But Democrats keep slipping into this idea

...