Unseating a longtime congressman in a primary is hard. It’s especially hard to do in a district where the family of the incumbent holds a handful of other elected offices, where there are schools named after the guy you’re trying to defeat. In Texas’s Twenty-eighth Congressional District, 26-year-old immigration lawyer Jessica Cisneros came close, though. Her bid to replace U.S. representative Henry Cuellar came up just 2,700 votes short, and 3.6 percentage points away from launching a candidate who’d been pegged as the next Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to Congress in the solidly blue district. Given the inherent challenges in winning a race like that, it’s an impressive result—but a loss is still a loss, and not just for Cisneros.
