Texas Republican Rep. Dan Crenshaw has long had a bit of a fractious relationship with the more extreme members of his party. He was one of just a few Republicans to vote to certify Biden's election in 2020, and he's often feuded with fellow Republican, Georgia's Marjorie Taylor Greene. Though he's been a reliable vote against the Biden agenda and is backing Trump again, co-hosting a fundraiser for the former president, he's clearly not alright with the base.

With about 73 percent of the vote reporting, he leads his conservative challenger Jameson Ellis by just 17 points. That might seem like a lot, but consider that just two years ago, Crenshaw also faced Ellis in the 2022 GOP primary and defeated him by a much wider 58-point margin.

—Jacob Rubashkin, Inside Elections

Democratic Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee is projected to win the Democratic primary in Texas's 18th District, fending off a challenge from former Houston City Councilwoman Amanda Edwards. Jackson Lee lost a bit of steam in her congressional campaign by running for Houston mayor last year, a race she lost. But after jumping back into her reelection bid, she has managed to edge out the young upstart challenger in Edwards, all but guaranteeing her another term in this deep-blue district.

—Kaleigh Rogers, 538

I don't doubt that there are parts of the GOP electorate this cycle that are hard to capture, and they may well be Democratic-leaning independents or just straight up Democrats. But equally importantly, we should keep in mind that primary polls are the most prone to error of all the kinds of election polls out there. And actually, outside of Michigan, the polls have been well within the 8 to 10 percentage points of average primary polling error we should expect.

—Galen Druke, 538

ABC News is projecting that Biden and Trump will win their respective presidential primaries in Texas, as will Republican Sen. Ted Cruz, who Democrats are angling to unseat this fall. The race for the Democratic Senate nomination in Texas is hot, though as I mentioned earlier, the front-runner is Rep. Colin Allred, a former NFL player and civil rights attorney who has represented the Dallas area since 2019.

—Kaleigh Rogers, 538

As the Super Tuesday results come in, there will be a lot of attention to how they compare with the 2016 primaries. In early voting states such as Iowa and New Hampshire, Trump has tended to do better in the places where he did well eight years ago. But we should be careful not to overstate the continuity. While Trump was seen as a relatively moderate Republican back in 2016, he now anchors the conservative end of the political spectrum.

In January 2016, Diana Mutz and I asked a population-based panel of Americans 26 and older whom they supported in the GOP presidential primary. Back then, Trump's best group of GOP primary voters were actually those who called themselves "moderates," while Ted Cruz won respondents who said they were "extremely conservative." Later that year, we asked all respondents to place Trump on a 7-point ideology scale, where "1" meant "extremely liberal" and 7 meant "extremely conservative." Trump scored 5.0, placing him almost exactly at "slightly conservative."

But after Trump had been president for three years and had overseen major tax cuts and an effort to repeal the Affordable Care Act — not to mention being the face of a growing contingent of MAGA-inspired conservatives — perceptions of him had changed. In January 2020, our panelists rated him a 5.6, meaning they saw him as closer to "conservative" than to "slightly conservative."

Other data reinforces the idea that perceptions of Trump continued to shift, and that he shed the perception of being a moderate. In April 2021, I teamed up with Hans Noel to ask political activists who was more conservative among pairs of prominent politicians. From those comparisons, we generated perceived ideology scores. By then, Trump was perceived by all respondents to be fairly far on the conservative end of the spectrum, with just ten GOP politicians to his right versus 43 to his left. (The Republicans who were perceived to be on his right are generally seen as Trump allies, such as Sens. Tommy Tuberville, Josh Hawley and Tom Cotton.) It's noteworthy that at the time, Nikki Haley was ranked just two slots less conservative than Trump.

Noel and I replicated the analysis in November 2023 in a YouGov survey of American adults. Among Republican survey respondents, Ron DeSantis was thought to be the second most conservative figure, with only Ted Cruz viewed as more conservative. But Trump was also far on the conservative end of the spectrum, ranking fifth out of 23 Republicans on the list. It's no surprise that in that same survey, Trump's best group for the primary was respondents who called themselves "very conservative."

Haley, by contrast, had come to be seen as closer to the center of the GOP — she was viewed as more conservative than Mitch McConnell, Chris Christie and Kevin McCarthy, but also more liberal than fellow primary candidates Vivek Ramaswamy and Mike Pence, and Trump allies like Hawley and Sarah Huckabee Sanders. Haley's best group in the November survey was self-described "moderates," although Trump still won that group with 51 percent compared to Haley's 18.

That reflects the fact that DeSantis and Haley cut somewhat different profiles among GOP primary voters. While Haley is the Trump challenger still in the race, DeSantis seems to have been the bigger threat to the conservative base that Trump has come to rely on. And with DeSantis out of the race, Trump has been able to consolidate the GOP's conservative wing, which has increasingly been defined by his politics since 2016.

—Dan Hopkins, 538 contributor