On Tuesday, a little-known candidate who won a couple of thousand votes in the Texas primary dragged out an already fierce Democratic race for more than two months.
In Texas, candidates must win at least 50 percent of the vote to nominate their party. If no one receives at least 50 percent, the top two voters advance to the second round. Representative Henry Cuellar, a longtime Democrat from South Texas, won the most votes in his primary on Tuesday but failed to reach the 50 percent threshold, forcing him into a runoff against Jessica Cisneros, a progressive immigration lawyer.
As of Thursday afternoon, Cuellar had won 48.4 percent of the vote, while Cisneros had 46.9 percent. The third Liberal candidate, Tannya Benavidez, won 4.7%. Attempts to contact Benavidez were unsuccessful. She didn’t even come close to qualifying for the runoff in May, but garnered enough votes to prevent any candidate from winning the primary.
They’ve been called spoiler candidates, but that’s not necessarily the correct descriptor.
Major party candidates who do not receive enough support are, in many ways, just as responsible for their defeats as obscure candidates who garner only a small fraction of the vote. But spoiler candidates have helped change American politics for better or worse. One third-party candidate in Georgia told us that he was the target of Republican ire — even death threats — for running in the 2020 Senate race.
Candidate Shane Hazel, a libertarian, received 2.3 percent of the vote in Georgia’s November 2020 general election.
David Perdue, the incumbent Republican senator, scored less than half a percentage point from the 50 percent mark. John Ossoff, a Democrat, also made it to the second round and won a seat in the Senate. Ossoff’s victory, along with Raphael Warnock, his fellow Democrat from Georgia, gave their party control of the Senate.
While Hazel and his supporters have been elated that the erratic campaign has affected the Senate race, he doesn’t call himself a spoiler. He may have angered Republicans for helping thwart Purdue’s victory, but he said his intention was to give voters a vote, not just send the race to a runoff.