Noriega Appears to Have Avoided Run-Off

He probably won't relax until the very last precincts come in, but with 99.83% of them counted, it appears that Houston state Rep. Rick Noriega has avoided a runoff in his Democratic primary bid for U.S. Senate. As slim as his 50.97% majority is, it's surely not possible for the 14 remaining boxes (of 8,247) to take that away.

Although Noriega certainly would have won a runoff, he needs to save precious campaign funds before he tackles incumbent Republican John Cornyn in the fall. Unfortunately – but all too predictably – Noriega's run to the Democratic nomination was almost tripped up not by Corpus Christi schoolteacher Ray McMurrey, a good debater who billed himself as the "progressive alternative" on the ballot, but rather by perennial candidate Gene Kelly, who regularly puts his famous name on the ballot apparently just to see how many idiots will confuse him with the famous dead dancer. This year, there were 582,018 of them, which gave Kelly 27% of the vote. Another perennial candidate, San Antonio's Rhett Smith, got 10%.

Noriega avoided a fate similar to Barbara Radnofsky, whose 2006 challenge to Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison was slowed up when Kelly (and the dumbasses who vote for him) forced her into a runoff.

(By the way: When Kelly filed back in December, I correctly predicted that this would doom McMurrey to a third-place finish.)