One of the year’s most exciting primary races took a dispiritingly tawdry tone this week when a tabloid reported that the progressive candidate in a House primary in South Texas had, a decade ago, been involved in a teacher-student sexual relationship. That this immediately became a media scandal, reported widely on right-wing sites, with some calling it a “character issue” for the candidate, would be understandable in some circumstances. After all, teachers lose their jobs and even go to prison when such relationships are revealed. The present-day social consensus is that teenagers are vulnerable, not quite adults, and that sexual relationships between them and those charged with teaching them is a form of exploitation. Most people agree: adults shouldn’t have sex with kids, even kids who are almost adults. A candidate running for office who’d done that would be doomed.

But there was a weird twist to this story. It wasn’t the teacher running for office. The candidate was the student.

Jessica Cisneros, twenty-eight, an immigration lawyer backed by democratic socialist congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and the Justice Democrats, is challenging conservative Democratic incumbent Henry Cuellar to represent the Twenty-Eighth Congressional District in South Texas. She was eighteen at the time of the reported relationship, and her teacher, John Balli, was forty.