Texas candidate backed by Trump campaign manager loses primary

A candidate backed by President Trump’s recently announced 2020 campaign manager was easily defeated in a Texas primary race Tuesday night.

Brad Parscale, who was tapped last month to lead Trump’s reelection campaign, had backed Robert Stovall in the GOP primary for the House seat in Texas’s 21st District.

Stovall finished sixth out of the 18 GOP candidates in the primary, with 4.8 percent of the vote, BuzzFeed News reported.

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Parscale had spoken out in favor of Stovall in the weeks leading up to the race and told a local newspaper in November that he was helping with the campaign. He served as digital adviser to Trump’s 2016 campaign.

“I have considerable data on that congressional district and have a pretty good road map of what it looks like,” Parscale told the San Antonio Express-News in November. “It will be a big help to him to have the kind of data that I have, in understanding what the turnout model looks like there. I just have a pretty big arsenal, comparable to other people running down there.”

Parscale had also told the Express-News that he thought Stovall would be “a good candidate and a strong advocate for Trump’s agenda.”

Chip Roy, a former chief of staff to Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), won the GOP primary with 27 percent of the vote. He will face business owner Matthew McCall, who got 17 percent of the vote, in a primary runoff.

The candidates are competing to replace retiring Rep. Lamar Smith (R-Texas).

Parscale’s father was running for office in Texas as well, but also lost Tuesday night, coming in third in the race for Bexar County Republican Party chairman.