After Democrat Taylor Rehmet beat the GOP’s Leigh Wambsganss in the January 31 special runoff election for state Senate District 9 , Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick called the loss “a wake-up call for Republicans across Texas.” It’s been a common sentiment in the Republican Party in recent days, especially since a Democrat hasn’t won that seat since 1991.
Rehmet’s win was a 31-point swing from President Donald Trump’s victory there less than a year and a half ago—and a 37-point swing from the GOP incumbent’s margin in that district in 2022. What’s more, Wambsganss had 10 times as much money as Rehmet, including large checks from heavyweights like Texans for Lawsuit Reform and right-wing megadonor Tim Dunn’s PAC.
But Brian Mayes, a longtime Republican strategist, saw this coming.
After last May, when a dozen local candidates endorsed by the Tarrant County GOP lost their elections, Mayes figured the party was heading toward more defeat. “It’s like when a football team loses, you can either go back and figure out why you lost and make hard decisions, or you don’t,” Mayes told the Texas Observer, and “you keep doing the same thing over and over.”
Wambganss has helped lead the school board culture wars that have dominated Tarrant County politics for much of the last five years, and as Mayes sees it, voters were ready for something different. It helped that Rehmet, a Machinists union leader, was a strong candidate whose focus on public education clearly resonated across party lines.
Kendall Scudder, chair of the Texas Democratic Party, put it bluntly. “We had a really good candidate, and they had a really bad candidate,” he told the Observer.
While political observers have stopped short of saying this is the first break of an all-out anti-MAGA wave, voter data indicates that Republicans are more vulnerable than the party may realize—especially in Tarrant County, which is currently the largest red county in the nation and a key battleground in the 2026 elections. (With the Texas Legislature currently out of session, Rehmet is unlikely to cast a vote in the state Senate before he and Wambsganss rematch in the November general election for the seat’s full term.)
Ross Hunt, a Republican data analyst who has been dissecting the numbers and sharing takeaways on his X feed, said the GOP lost the seat “because of the failure to persuade swing Republicans and right-leaning independents.”
Hunt wrote on X: “Republicans’ handpicked candidate for this working-and middle-class, 51% Fort Worth district was a socially conservative political operative from a wealthy suburb that makes up 4% of the District.”
Meanwhile, Wambsganss’ opponent offered a stark contrast: He was “Mr. Tarrant County,” as Scudder put it. “He’s a union leader, veteran, very disciplined on his messaging and very hyper-focused on the working class and making life better for people,” Scudder said. “Leigh is a zealot who spends all of her time denigrating public school teachers and trying to dismantle public school institutions.”
But candidate quality alone, Scudder argues, can’t explain what he called a “perfect storm.” He credited an unusually coordinated Democratic effort that began months before the runoff. Specifically, the Texas Democratic Party (TDP) helped the Rehmet campaign make 1.5 million phone calls, knock on 20,000 doors and send 300,000 text messages. Nearly $150,000, about half of Rehmet’s campaign funds, came via the Texas Majority PAC, which is running a joint political operation with the TDP.
“For the first time in a very long time, Democrats were operating as a team, moving in the same direction with the same goal, and that’s to win an election,” Scudder said.
In a statement to the Observer, Rehmet said broadening his tent was a central part of his strategy. “In the final days of the race, I spoke with voters from across the political spectrum, including many Republicans, and I was grateful for their honesty and openness,” Rehmet said. “We didn’t agree on everything but what consistently stood out was a shared respect and a willingness to listen to one another. At the end of the day, those conversations reminded me that most of us want the same things like safe communities, strong schools and a government that is effective.”
The Wambsganss campaign did not respond to a request for comment. On social media, Allen Blakemore, Wambsganss’ political consultant, blamed low turnout among Republicans for the surprise result. Just under 95,000 votes were cast, marking a 15 percent turnout rate for the runoff.
But other operatives have dismissed the notion that low turnout was the sole reason for Rehmet’s upset. He not only succeeded in peeling away GOP and independent voters, but was also able to mobilize Latino voters. Latinos make up slightly more than one in five eligible voters in Senate District 9, and in some largely Hispanic areas of Fort Worth, Rehmet outperformed Kamala Harris by 50 points.
Jason Villalba, a former Republican legislator who now runs a think tank focused on Latino voters, said at least some of that shift can be attributed to the Trump administration’s approach to immigration. “I think that trend is that Hispanics are not moving towards the GOP like they were in 2024,” Villalba said. “I think they are going back to their historic support for Democrats as they were in 2012 and 2016.”
But Tarrant County is also unique because of the prevalence of far-right Christian nationalists. For several years, a church called Mercy Culture has been amassing political influence on the local and national stage. (State Representative Nate Schatzline, a Mercy Culture pastor, recently joined President Trump’s faith advisory board.) The church effectively runs For Liberty & Justice, an organization that teaches conservative Christians how to run for office. The organization endorsed Wambsganns.
After the Rehmet win, many Republican heavyweights gathered at an event hosted by For Liberty & Justice. Ken Paxton was there, as was Tarrant County Judge Tim O’Hare. “This is the time to stand up and fight, and this is the time that God calls us to rebuild the wall around Jerusalem, and that wall is Tarrant County,” O’Hare told attendees.
Meanwhile, Allison Campolo, chair of the local Democratic Party, said Tarrant County Republicans have now cornered themselves by developing such close ties with groups like Mercy Culture. “All of our top Republicans are intimately tied with Mercy Culture,” Campolo said. “They either have to own that shit, which will lose them a lot of votes, or they have to separate themselves from it, which will also lose them a lot of votes.”
In other words, Campolo says the local Republican brand is in crisis: “You don’t get an over 30-point swing in Fort Worth, Texas, if your brand is okay.”
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