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WASHINGTON (AP) — Voters cast ballots Tuesday in primary elections in six states, plus a runoff in Mississippi. Highlights:

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TOP OF THE TICKET

In Mississippi's often-bitter Republican contest, veteran Sen. Thad Cochran defeated state Sen. Chris McDaniel. The tea party-backed insurgent had channeled voters' anti-Washington mood and forced a runoff. McDaniel offered no explicit concession, but instead complained of "dozens of irregularities" that he implied were due to Cochran courting Democrats and independents.

As he sought a seventh term, Cochran reached out to traditionally Democratic voters — blacks and union members — who were eligible to participate in the runoff. People who cast ballots in the June 3 Democratic primary could not vote in the runoff.

Cochran, 76, had sent billions of federal dollars to his poor state over a long career. His 41-year-old challenger said taxpayers could not afford that federal largesse.

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NEW LAWMAKER FOR NEW YORK?

Looking for a 23rd term, Democratic Rep. Charles Rangel of New York worked to fend off a state senator who could become the first Dominican-American member of Congress. The race was too close to call early Wednesday, with an undetermined number of absentee and provisional ballots outstanding.

The 84-year-old Rangel, the third-most-senior member of the House, faced a rematch against state Sen. Adriano Espaillat in Harlem and upper Manhattan. Two years ago, Rangel prevailed in the primary by fewer than 1,100 votes.

In this race, Rangel said Espaillat "wants to be the Jackie Robinson of the Dominicans in the Congress," adding that Espaillat should tell voters "just what the heck has he done besides saying he's a Dominican?"

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DOUBLE DIPPING IN OKLAHOMA

Both of Oklahoma's Senate seats were on the ballot for the first time in recent history.

Sen. Jim Inhofe fended off minor challengers in the Republican primary in one of those contests.

In the other, two-term Rep. James Lankford of Oklahoma won the GOP nomination in the race to succeed Sen. Tom Coburn, who is stepping down with two years left in his term. In a blow to the tea party movement, Lankford, a member of the House GOP leadership, defeated T.W. Shannon, a member of the Chickasaw Nation and the state's first black House speaker.

National tea party groups and the Senate Conservatives Fund had backed Shannon, who also had the support of Sarah Palin and Texas Sen. Ted Cruz.

Shannon, 36, had questioned if Lankford was sufficiently conservative. Lankford, 46 and a former Southern Baptist camp leader, supported bipartisan budget agreements and voted to increase the nation's borrowing authority — favorite objections for tea party leaders.

Oklahoma has not elected a Democrat to an open Senate seat since David Boren in 1978, and Republicans were expected to hold it.

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UNNECESSARY UTAH

Utah technically had a primary, but there was little suspense and even fewer consequences.

The state is essentially a one-party operation where Republicans are guaranteed to occupy most major offices. The party selected its nominees for the state's four congressional districts, governor and attorney general at its party convention, and Tuesday's vote was largely unnecessary.

Democrats did the same, but they're unlikely to get anywhere in November.

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COLORADO GOP DIVIDED

Primary day was an all-Republican affair in Colorado, a reflection of how the party remains divided in that key state.

Former Rep. Bob Beauprez won the crowded primary that included 2008 presidential candidate Tom Tancredo, an immigration opponent. That was welcome news to national Republicans who feared that Tancredo would be a drag on the GOP ticket in November. Beauprez faces Democratic Gov. John Hickenlooper.

District Attorney Ken Buck, a former Senate candidate, defeated three other Republicans for the party's nomination to replace Rep. Cory Gardner. The congressman passed on re-election to challenge Democratic Sen Mark Udall.

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SENATE CONTROL

Tuesday's primaries were unlikely to affect the partisan makeup of the Senate.

Udall and Gardner were assured of their parties' nominations. Their Nov. 4 contest will help determine whether Republicans can pick up the six seats they need to control the Senate next year.

Mississippi and Oklahoma are solidly Republican states, so winners of those GOP primaries will be strongly favored in November.

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S.C. SCHOOLS CHIEF

In South Carolina, the widow of legendary Republican strategist Lee Atwater lost to the leader of the state's principals' and superintendents' association, Molly Spearman.

Sally Atwater, a longtime fixture in GOP politics and a former educator, struggled as a first-time candidate. Debates did not favor her and, in one interview, she was unable to explain her position on whether sex education and evolution should be taught in public schools.

The late Lee Atwater was a top strategist for Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush. His hard-charging tactics are legendary in GOP circles, although his wife's campaign did not seem to harness them.

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UP NEXT

The next major date on the midterm calendar is July 22, when voters in Georgia will pick between Rep. Jack Kingston and businessman David Perdue for the Republican nomination for Senate in a runoff.

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Associated Press writers Charles Babington in Washington, Nicholas Riccardi in Denver and Sean Murphy in Oklahoma City contributed to this report.

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Follow Philip Elliott on Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/philip_elliott

MILWAUKEE (AP) — A 12-year-old girl who authorities say was stabbed 19 times by two classmates trying to please a fictional character is making steady physical and emotional progress, and she recently enjoyed a movie date with her father, her family said Tuesday.

The southeastern Wisconsin girl, who was stabbed in the legs, arms and torso, can walk but her movement is limited by breathing problems, said family spokesman Steve Lyons. He did not provide a long-term prognosis at the family's request, but voiced optimism that she will make a full recovery.

Court documents say two 12-year-old classmates stabbed the girl in a plan to curry favor with Slender Man, a character in horror stories they had read online. The girls told investigators they believed Slender Man had a mansion in a Wisconsin forest and they planned to live with him after earning his approval by killing their classmate.

They lured her to a wooded Waukesha park on May 31. One told investigators she told the victim to lie down and be quiet after the stabbing so she wouldn't lose blood as quickly, but the suspect said she actually wanted the girl to be silent so she would die without drawing attention to them.

Once the attackers left, the victim crawled to a road, where a bicyclist found her. Doctors later told police the girl narrowly escaped death because the knife came within a millimeter of piercing a major artery near her heart. She was released from a hospital about two weeks ago.

The family said in a statement that the girl is on a "miraculous road to recovery" and adjusting to the "new normal." The family has safeguarded the girl's name and asked friends not to identify her.

"She has a courageous heart and bravely deals with both the physical and emotional challenges since the attack," the family said.

She felt strong enough recently to go see a Disney movie with her father, Lyons said.

The two suspects are charged in adult court with attempted homicide. The Associated Press isn't naming the accused girls because their cases could end up in juvenile court.

Supporters from around the world have donated nearly $50,000 to help with medical bills, along with gifts, care packages and purple hearts — the girl's favorite color, Lyons said.

"The family is just overwhelmed by the outpouring of support," he said. "We in Wisconsin talk about Midwestern values, but this really goes across the nation, and even around the world."

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Online:

Fundraising website: http://www.gofundme.com/HeartsForHealingWI

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Dinesh Ramde can be reached at dramde@ap.org.

TAIPEI, Taiwan (AP) — China has sent its first ever ministerial-level official to Taiwan for four days of meetings to rebuild ties with the self-ruled island that Beijing claims as its own, after mass protests in Taipei set back relations earlier this year.

Zhang Zhijun, minister of Beijing's Taiwan Affairs Office, reached the island's main airport just before noon Wednesday to speak privately with his government counterpart about cutting import tariffs and establishing consular-style offices helpful to investors and tourists.

China and Taiwan have been separately ruled since the Chinese civil war of the 1940s. China sees the island as part of its territory that eventually must be reunified — by force if necessary — despite a Taiwanese public largely wary of the notion of Chinese rule. In 2008, Beijing set aside its military threats to sign agreements binding its economy to that of the investment-hungry island.

But in March, hundreds of student-led protesters forcibly occupied parliament in Taipei to stop ratification of a two-way service trade liberalization pact. The 24-day action dubbed the Sunflower Movement spiraled into the thousands, many of whom demanded an end to Taiwan's engagement with China, which they still see as an enemy.

"Zhang wants to show to the world, Taiwan and the mainland included, that the two sides are moving closer in spite of the Sunflower Movement earlier this year," says Lenoard Chu, a China studies professor retired from National Chengchi University in Taipei.

As the official travels around Taiwan through Saturday, he is expected to try to head off any new protests by shunning strong political statements during scheduled chats with students, low-income people and a figure in Taiwan's anti-China chief opposition party.

ARRIAGA, Mexico (AP) — On the last day of school Gladys Chinoy memorized her mother's phone number in New York City and boarded a bus to Guatemala's northern border.

With nothing but the clothes on her back, the 14-year-old took a truck-tire raft across the Naranjo River into Mexico and joined a group of five women and a dozen children waiting with one of the smugglers who are paid $6,000 to $7,000 for each migrant they take to the U.S.

The women and children waited by the train tracks in this small town in the southern state of Chiapas until the shriek of a train whistle and the glare of headlights pierced the night. Suddenly, dozens of teens and mothers with young children flooded out of darkened homes and budget hotels, rushing to grab the safest places on the roof of the northbound freight train and join a deluge of children and mothers that is overwhelming the U.S. immigration system.

The number of unaccompanied minors detained on the U.S. border has more than tripled since 2011. Children are also widely believed to be crossing with their parents in rising numbers, although the Obama administration has not released year-by-year figures. The crisis has sparked weeks of bitter political debate inside the U.S., with the administration saying crime is driving migrants north from Central America and congressional Republicans saying Obama's policies is leading migrants to believe children and their mothers will be allowed to stay.

In interviews along the primary migrant route north to the United States, dozens of migrants like Gladys indicated that both sides are right.

A vast majority said they were fleeing gang violence that has reached epidemic levels in Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador in recent years. The migrants also uniformly said they decided to head north because they had heard that a change in U.S. law requires the Border Patrol to swiftly release children and their mothers and let them stay in the United States.

The belief that women and children can safely surrender to authorities the moment they set foot in the U.S. has changed the calculus of tens of thousands of parents who no longer worry about their children finishing the dangerous trip north through Mexico with a potentially deadly multiday hike through the desert Southwest.

"The United States is giving us a great opportunity because now, with this new law, we don't have to try to cross the desert where so many people die. We can hand ourselves over directly to the authorities," Gladys said, adding that she hopes to become a doctor.

The smiling teenager with long black hair said she was more excited about seeing her mother again than she was scared about the trip. Her mother said she was aware of the dangers but finally decided the risk was worth it after five years apart.

Reached by phone at home, the mother said she decided to send for her daughter because "if she gets across she can stay here, that's what you hear."

"Now they say that all children need to do is hand themselves over to the Border Patrol," said the mother, who declined to provide her name because she is in the U.S. illegally.

The migrants' faith isn't totally misplaced. While Mexicans generally are returned across the border quickly when they're caught, overwhelmed border facilities leave the government with no way to care for most Central American children and their parents. The Central American minors who cross the border alone have generally been released into the care of relatives already in the U.S., while mothers with children are let go with a notice to appear later in immigration court.

While many children and families may eventually be ordered out of the U.S., many are reporting in calls back home that they're free to move around the U.S. while their cases wend through a process that can take years.

The Obama administration estimates that between October 2013 and September 2014 it will have caught 90,000 children trying to illegally cross the Mexican border without their parents. Last year, the U.S. returned fewer than 2,000 children to their native countries.

"The story is that you have to give yourself up to the Border Patrol, provide a contact in the United States and you'll be freed even though they give you a court date far in the future," said Ruben Figueroa, a member of the Mesoamerica Migrant Movement, who works in a shelter for migrants crossing the southeast Mexico state of Tabasco. "If you combine this information with the violence in the streets and extortion keeping people from living their lives, the result is a massive exodus."

Rocio Quinteros worked selling snacks in front of a school in San Miguel, 80 miles outside the capital of El Salvador, until gangsters' demands for a percentage of her income made it impossible to make a living.

She said that when she could no longer afford to pay, members of the Mara Salvatrucha gang threatened to recruit her 14-year-old son instead. This month, she told local gang members she was taking her four children, ages 11 to 17, to see their sick grandmother in another city. Then they abandoned their packed-dirt home on the northeastern edge of the city and headed north.

"They ask you for 100 and you give it, then they ask for 200, and they suffocate you until you have to hand over everything, even your house," she said as she waited with her youngest child in the women's section of Arriaga's migrant shelter. "If we had stayed in El Salvador, I already would have had to bury one of my sons."

With no toys to entertain them, the children in the women's section watch TV until their parents hear the train is on its way. As she waited, Quinteros spoke to her older children through the bars of the metal door of the men's section of the shelter.

In Carmensa, the neighborhood that she and her children abandoned, dozens of homes sit empty because their owners have gone to the United States. The remaining residents described daily lives marred by constant fear.

Gonzalo Velasquez, 66, said he had fled the countryside for San Miguel when El Salvador's 1980s civil war forced him off his small farm in the countryside.

"I lived through the war but this is different," he said. "Before, we knew who was shooting. Today nobody knows ... If you have little kids, young ones, it's better to go so they don't go into the gangs . the stores are closing because they get asked for payoffs and can't pay, so it's better to close."

Quinteros said she believed she was saving her children by fleeing to a place where they wouldn't be subject to gang recruitment.

"On the way north you have the hope of living and the risk of death," she said. "Back home death is certain."

The Obama administration said Friday that it was opening family detention centers on the border to reduce the number of women and children that are released. Vice President Joe Biden flew to Guatemala the same day to emphasize the dangers of the northbound journey and the low chances of staying in the U.S. for good.

It's a tough sell for Central American migrants who say life at home has simply become intolerable.

As Gladys and her companions boarded the train Thursday night, Natanael Lemus, a 30-year-old mechanic from El Salvador, dragged his 10-year-old son, Edwin, and 12-year-old daughter, Cynthia, by the hands as he ran alongside, asking those already aboard for help getting them onto the roof.

On the crowded and slippery roof, Lemus cut black plastic trash bags into raincoats for his wife and kids and tied them to the train with ropes so they wouldn't fall off. He explained that he wanted to leave behind his workshop in the capital, San Salvador, because extortion made it impossible to earn a living.

"If you buy a car, they come to extort you. A machine for the workshop, they come to extort you. If they see you put on some nice pants or sneakers, they come to extort you," Lemus said. "You can't work like that. You go bankrupt."

He said that after taking his wife and children safely north he would wait in Mexico for a chance to cross on his own and hopefully not get caught.

But most important, he said, was getting his wife and children into the hands of the Border Patrol, the first step in what he hoped would be a new and better life.

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Associated Press writers Marcos Aleman in San Miguel, El Salvador; Sonia Perez in Guatemala City; Alicia Caldwell in Washington and Michael Weissenstein in Mexico City contributed to this report.