As a University of Texas alumnus and a native Texan, it's a little unnerving to come back to town for Southby. That's the time when Austinites clear out of town, as American Apparel–clad hipsters descend like a swarm of locusts on the capital, which is to say nothing of the plague of A&R execs that follows. After all, Austin's the Live Music Capital of the World; shows at every club every night is nothing new.

But it was a different circus that was the subject of complaint at Gonna Gonna Get Down 3, the party hosted at the Mohawk by Justin Cox and the folks at Austinist. In attendance were Catherine Andrews of Washingtonian magazine, as well as Reihan Salam of The American Scene. (Whose interpretive take on Samantha Powers's "monster" gaffe will gain new context if he follows through on plans to see R.E.M. perform tonight at Stubb's.) At the party, I met Dan Grant, a candidate for Congress who recently lost his contest for the Texas 10th District in the March 4 Texas primacaucus. Grant says that the hubbub that surrounded the Democratic presidential race between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama had consequences beyond the contest itself—particularly for down-ballot contests.

The contest attracted an unprecedented number of new voters and Democratic Party registratants. However, the hype didn't do much to enlighten the issues surrounding the other twenty contests on the ballot. The lack of information, he says, was astonishing. Grant—who lost the primary to Larry Joe Doherty—explains that new voters who showed up at polls to affirm their support for either Clinton or Obama were not necessarily aware that other contests were even at stake. Those new voters ticked off the first name to appear in each of the nonpresidential contests, claims Grant, lending weight to candidates whose names appear first in the alphabet. And in the end, D comes before G. Alpha-deficient Grant explains that there was a striking difference between results at those polls where the Doherty and Grant campaigns supplied literature and those that went unstaffed.

The Texas 10th isn't an easy district to field. Midwived by former Republican representative (and one-time House Majority Leader) Tom DeLay during the Texas redistricting fiasco, the Texas 10th was once represented by Lyndon Johnson. As the Austin Chronicle explains, until the Austin district was carved up by DeLay et al., it was fortress to Rep. Lloyd Doggett (who is now castled in one of the three districts that comprises Austin, the Texas 25th.) Today, the Texas 10th stretches from Austin all the way to Houston. "I put 26,000 miles on a car I bought in June," says Grant, describing his campaign along the vast stretch of highway 290.

Grant's predicament falls in line with an issue that's an increasing point of media scrutiny: the situation of down-ballot contests as the Clinton/Obama race goes on. The opportunity cost to the continuing campaign, it has been said, is the lack of a presumptive Democratic nominee to speak on behalf of (and fundraise for) down-ballot contestants. (Like Larry Joe Doherty.) My conversation with Grant also came before Shearwater's set and during a party at which free barbecue and Miller High Life were being offered, prompting at least one observer to hint that DC visitors are a circus in and of themselves.