Most Polls Close in N.C. as Voter Confusion Snarls Texas

The midterm elections officially begin on Tuesday with primaries in Texas, North Carolina, and Arkansas. As conflict with Iran breaks out, Democrats and Republicans are figuring out who they want to lead their party into November's general election, when control of Congress and statehouses around the country will be up for grabs.

The most hotly contested races of the day are in Texas, with fierce competition on both sides of the aisle for U.S. Senate nominations.

It's possible that the Republican campaign will continue into a runoff. Some voters in two major Texas counties are being turned away at polling locations and directed to different voting precincts, causing confusion and frustration.

Here's the latest:

Rep. Jasmine Crockett says irregularities in Dallas County, her home base, could be determinative in an extremely close election.

"If one person has the right to vote and they weren't allowed to cast their vote, we should all be standing together — Democrats, Republicans — and we should all be raising hell," she said at a news conference shortly after a judge extended voting hours in Dallas County.

"So I am asking you, I am begging you, to make sure that you go ahead and figure out where it is that you are supposed to vote," she added. "Stand in line, wait in line."

A Dallas judge ordered the polls to stay open an extra two hours until 9 p.m. local time.

The extension follows chaos in the county and a suburban one outside Austin because the local Republican parties refused to hold joint primaries with Democrats. That meant that rather than voting at countywide vote centers as has been done for years in Texas, voters in those two counties needed to find their own precincts to cast ballots.

Hundreds were unable to vote, Dallas Democrats said. Democrats asked a judge to extend poll hours. Crockett said the extended hours apply only to Democratic primary sites because the GOP did not make the request as well.

North Carolina law says the voting sites close at 7:30 p.m. ET and that anyone in line at the time can still cast a ballot.

But one of the roughly 2,600 sites statewide is staying open for an hour longer. The State Board of Elections gave voters extra time in a rural Halifax County precinct because workers had a problem with electronic poll books and didn't use any backup measures to let people vote.

The state board said the delay means it won't be releasing vote totals publicly until 8:30 p.m., when the Halifax County precinct closes. During the delay, counties can count votes and report the results internally to the state.

North Carolina voters are choosing Democrat and Republican nominations for the U.S. Senate seat being vacated by Republican Thom Tillis and for U.S. House seats. Voters also are choosing primary winners for state legislative, judicial, and local races.

The campaign of state Rep. James Talerico says it's "deeply concerned" about reports of voting troubles in two major Texas counties.

The campaign called for voting hours to be extended but did not say whether it would file a lawsuit asking a judge to intervene.

Some voters in Dallas and Williamson counties are being turned away at polling locations and directed to different voting precincts.

The head of the association for North Carolina county elections directors says she doesn't believe colleagues elsewhere in the state will release their countywide primary election results until the State Board of Elections starts doing so at 8:30 p.m. ET.

Results usually start getting released by the state board shortly after polls close statewide at 7:30 p.m. But the state board delayed that because members agreed earlier Tuesday to extend voting by an hour at one Halifax County precinct.

Association president Leigh Anne Price, who is also the Johnston County elections director, said her office is "going to follow what the state board has directed us to do."

Elections boards in the state's three largest counties — Wake, Mecklenburg, and Guilford — also plan to do the same, officials said.

The Democrat congresswoman and U.S. Senate candidate from Dallas blamed local Republicans, as well as Republicans in the Austin area, for the confusion of voters who were being turned away from polling locations in Tuesday's primaries.

The GOP in both Dallas County and Williamson County in the Austin area opted to have voters cast ballots only in their home precincts instead of countywide. Crockett's campaign said that forced Democrats to do it, too.

Her campaign saw Republicans' goal as suppressing the vote and said her campaign is working with Democrat officials on possible responses, including extended voting hours.

"Texans don't appreciate having their votes suppressed and we won't take it lying down," her campaign said in a statement.

Tomas Sanchez was one of the voters in Dallas County who showed up at a voting location, ready to cast his ballot in the Democrat primary, and was turned away for being at the wrong precinct.

Sanchez, a student at Dallas College, planned to vote at a location on the campus. But instead was told he had to vote at a location closer to his neighborhood.

The 22-year-old said he was under the "mistaken impression" that he could vote anywhere in the county, which has been the case since 2019. But for this primary Election Day, the Dallas County Republican Party opted not to allow countywide voting locations. The decision affects all area voters, who now must cast ballots at their assigned precinct.

Rep. Wesley Hunt made his jump into politics after serving in the Army as an Apache helicopter pilot in Iraq and Saudi Arabia. He flew combat missions in Iraq.

The lifelong Houston resident and father of three lost his first race for Congress in 2020. However, redistricting created a solidly Republican district two years later, and he won the seat easily.

He's now positioning himself as an alternative to two older career politicians in the primary, four-term incumbent Sen. John Cornyn and Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton.

Senate GOP leaders opposed Hunt's run, believing it could prevent Cornyn from fending off Paxton's challenge. But he argued that voters wary of Paxton needed a choice other than Cornyn.

The release of voting results in North Carolina will be delayed an hour Tuesday night because state officials agreed to keep a precinct in one county open late after workers couldn't get some equipment working at the start of the day.

Workers at a precinct in rural Halifax County could not get the electronic poll books synchronized for 90 minutes and didn't use any backup measures to let people vote, according to testimony at an emergency meeting Tuesday afternoon of the North Carolina State Board of Elections.

Election officials said counties can go ahead and count votes when their polls close and report the results internally to the state. But the state isn't releasing vote totals publicly until 8:30 p.m. when the Halifax County precinct closes.

The precinct was in Littleton, a small community about 60 miles northeast of Raleigh.

They're sticking with voting machines in one of the nation's largest counties.

The reversal by the Dallas County Republican Party came after chairman Allen West, a former Florida congressman, spent months laying the groundwork for a massive hand count.

A large, labor-intensive hand count is slow, expensive, and prone to human error. And it would have required more polling locations and workers.

West abandoned plans for a hand count in December, saying officials were "woefully short" of the number of people needed to pull it off.

Some voters in two major Texas counties are being turned away at polling locations and directed to different voting precincts, causing confusion and frustration. The problems were hitting voters in Dallas County and Williamson County, which includes the suburbs north of Austin.

"We're seeing a lot of people that are going to their vote centers that they usually go to ... and not realizing they can't do that anymore. They have to go to their precinct-based location," Nic Solorzano, a spokesperson for the Dallas County Elections Department, told the AP.

Since 2019, area voters have been allowed to cast their ballots anywhere in the county. But for this primary, the Republican parties in both counties opted not to allow countywide voting locations.

Because both major parties have to agree on how to conduct the primary, the decision affects all voters. That meant that on Tuesday voters could cast ballots only at their assigned precinct.

Adding to the confusion is that voting locations also might be specific to someone's party affiliation, Solorzano said.

State Attorney General Ken Paxton not only has the endorsement of Turning Point USA, the conservative group founded by Charlie Kirk, but has played up Kirk praising him before the conservative leader was assassinated.

Paxton's ads down the stretch of his Senate bid included one with clips of Kirk calling him "one of the best attorney generals in the country."

Kirk also says Paxton is an "amazing, Constitution-loving Texan attorney general who is doing a great job."

Paxton made appearances sponsored by Turning Point USA on five college campuses last fall, and last month his campaign was endorsed by the influential group, which is aimed at mobilizing young conservatives.

Kirk was assassinated in September while speaking on a college campus in Utah.

The president has stayed out of the campaign in an uncharacteristic show of restraint from someone with a tendency to want to throw his weight behind important races.

President Donald Trump has endorsed congressional candidates and a long list of state lawmakers, including those who helped deliver on his demands for redrawn U.S. House maps that boost the GOP's chances of picking up more seats from the state in November.

But in the Republican Senate primary, the biggest race in Texas, Trump has declined to endorse Cornyn, Paxton, or Hunt.

Trump has said he supports all three. But things could change if there's a runoff, when it might be harder for him to stay on the sidelines once there's a leader in a head-to-head race.

The four-term Republican senator is in the fight of his political career in his heated primary against state Attorney General Ken Paxton and U.S. Rep. Wesley Hunt. That's new territory for Cornyn, 74, who has never before faced a significant GOP challenger.

His campaign to hang on comes barely a year after he narrowly lost a bid for Senate majority leader in 2024.

The three-way race raises the likelihood that neither Cornyn nor Paxton will get the 50% needed to avoid a May 26 runoff.

Michael Whatley received Trump's endorsement in North Carolina's U.S. Senate race last summer, weeks after Republican Sen. Thom Tillis announced he wouldn't seek reelection after facing criticism from the president.

The 57-year-old is his party's highest-profile candidate in the party, and he's repeatedly pledged to defend Trump's agenda in the Senate if he's elected.

Trump's endorsement highlighted Whatley's work as Republican National Committee chairman during his 2024 reelection campaign. Whatley also previously served as state party chair in North Carolina, whose electoral votes Trump won all three times that he ran for president.

Whatley has never run for public office until now. He's spent a lot of time accusing Roy Cooper of going soft on crime as governor, which Cooper denies.

The president accused the congressman of disloyalty for not leaving the Democratic Party after Trump pardoned him and his wife in a federal bribery and conspiracy case.

Rep. Henry Cuellar doesn't have a high-profile primary opponent in his district on the Mexico border. But he stands to face Republican Tano Tijerina — whom Trump endorsed — in the general election.

Cuellar is a moderate Democrat who kept his seat in 2024 even though Trump carried his district. Last year's Republican redrawing of the state's congressional map sought to make his heavily Hispanic district more winnable for the GOP.

He's been a fiery and high-profile ringleader of GOP revolts that bucked the party when he thought legislation wasn’t conservative enough.

Now Rep. Chip Roy wants to return to Texas, where the attorney general's office has become a driver of the conservative legal movement. He's running to replace three-term incumbent Paxton, nearly six years after Roy urged his onetime boss to step down after Paxton's top aides accused him of corruption.

Roy has clashed at times with Trump and other Republicans in Congress over federal spending bills. And he drew Trump's ire when he was willing to certify the 2020 election results.

Roy is in a crowded Republican field that includes two state senators, Joan Huffman and Mayes Middleton, and former Paxton senior aide Aaron Reitz.

Republicans redrew Texas's 38 congressional districts in hopes of giving the GOP five more winnable House seats in the state. Republicans in Missouri and North Carolina followed suit, hoping to pick up one more seat each.

But in November, California voters approved a plan championed by Democrat Gov. Gavin Newsom to give his party five additional winnable seats there, seeking to cancel out Texas' redrawn map.

Trump pushed mid-decade redistricting to help Republicans preserve their slim House majority. But Democrats have shown they can win in tough places ahead of the primary, including a stunning special election victory in a Texas state Senate district that Trump carried by double digits.

U.S. Senate campaigns are usually expensive affairs, given the number of television markets in North Carolina, the ninth-largest state. More than $300 million was spent in the 2020 race that ultimately came down to Thom Tillis vs. Cal Cunningham.

That amount could be easily surpassed should Democrat Cooper and Republican Whatley win their primaries Tuesday. The North Carolina seat is considered a pickup opportunity for Democrats trying to retake the Senate.

Both Cooper and Whatley have deep ties to state and national party donors, and outside groups will seek to influence the outcome with their own spending.

How much could be ultimately spent? Some pundits say $1 billion isn't out of the question. That would blow past $515.5 million spent overall on a U.S. Senate race in Georgia in 2020 ultimately won by Democrat Jon Ossoff. That's from Open Secrets, which tracks political spending.

So far, Cooper's campaign has raised $21.1 million through mid-February compared to $6.3 million by Whatley.

Like many Democrats, Talarico is targeting Trump over affordability concerns.

"I don't know what world the president is living in, because here in Texas life is more unaffordable than it's ever been before," he told The Associated Press on Sunday. "People are struggling with the high price of groceries but also struggling with the high price of housing, the high price of child care, the high price of prescription drugs."

In particular, Talarico noted that if Trump has to tell people it's getting better, it might not be.

"You can either believe the president or you can believe your own pocketbook," he says.

Paxton, the state attorney general, was just six months into the job in 2015 when he was indicted on felony securities fraud charges, threatening to sink his political career just as it was taking off.

Top Paxton aides later reported him to the FBI over accusations of corruption, leading to his historic impeachment in 2023 before his acquittal in the state Senate.

But past challengers who went after Paxton over his legal troubles found no success with voters — he won reelection twice while gaining popularity with conservative activists.

Supporters point to a record that includes leading Texas lawsuits seeking to restrict immigration, abortion access, and transgender rights.

Critics say he's untested on a big stage and his nomination would put GOP control of the Senate at risk in November.

The 2026 midterm season begins in earnest Tuesday with two of the nation's most consequential Senate primaries playing out in Texas, a political behemoth Democrats have been fighting to flip for decades.

Is this the year? Republican leaders in Washington openly fret that a victory by conservative firebrand Paxton over four-term incumbent Cornyn would give Democrats a rare shot of winning the seat come November.

The contest has already cost Republicans tens of millions of dollars, and there will be much more spent ahead of a May 26 runoff if no one gets 50% in the three-way primary that also includes Hunt.

Democrats, meanwhile, are picking between two rising stars with conflicting styles. There's Crockett, who made a name for herself through confrontation, and Talarico, a former middle school teacher who's working toward a divinity degree.