In a good deal of the coverage of today’s South Texas Democratic primary runoff between incumbent Henry Cuellar and challenger Jessica Cisneros, Cuellar is referred to as a centrist and Cisneros as a progressive.

That’s half right: Cisneros is indeed a progressive, but Cuellar is well to the right of any other Democratic member of the House. He’s best known for being the only House Democrat to have voted against a bill establishing (or re-establishing) a woman’s right to choose, but that’s hardly the only time he’s gone over, solo, to the Republican side. He is also the only House Democrat to have voted against the PRO Act, which would stiffen the penalties on employers who violate the National Labor Relations Act, characteristically by illegally firing workers engaged in efforts to unionize their workplace.

That begins to explain one of the defining features of this contest: Cisneros’s list of endorsers extends well beyond the usual progressive suspects. To be sure, it includes Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, AOC, Ayanna Pressley, and Katie Porter, not to mention the Working Families Party, Progressive Democrats of America, and Justice Democrats. But it also includes such mainstream Democratic groups as the Texas AFL-CIO, the Service Employees International Union, the Communications Workers of America, the Planned Parenthood Action Fund, Indivisible, the League of Conservation Voters, UNITE HERE, J Street, NARAL, the United Steelworkers, and the United Farm Workers. In other words, Cisneros is backed by virtually every constituency group that consistently turns out volunteers for Democratic candidates. Or, if you prefer, a representative sample of the entire Democratic base. For his part, Cuellar can claim the backing of no Democratic organization that has members, though he has benefited from the independent campaigns of center-right big-money PACs.

In fact, one reason (among many) today’s race is notable is that it pits the Democratic House leadership—Pelosi, Hoyer, Clyburn, and Jeffries, all of whom have backed Cuellar in a knee-jerk gesture of incumbent defense, notwithstanding his opposition to core Democratic principles—against the panoply of groups these same leaders count upon to propel their party to victory come election season.

In essence, then, today’s contest pits the Democratic leadership against the Democratic Party, or at least against the known Democratic universe. It also pits them against their own beliefs. On Morning Joe today, Speaker Pelosi spoke about the need to enshrine abortion rights into law—just 48 hours after she’d taped a robocall for Cuellar.

F. Scott Fitzgerald once wrote that "the test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function." By that standard, in this dubious context, Pelosi must be some kind of genius.