Amazing what a little overperforming versus expectations can do.
Taylor Rehmet
For months, the special election to succeed Acting Comptroller Kelly Hancock in a red-leaning North Texas Senate seat revolved around the two Republicans in the race.
But once the early voting and Election Day ballots were all counted on Tuesday, it was Democrat Taylor Rehmet who raked in the most votes out of all three candidates, coming within three percentage points — fewer than 3,000 votes — of a stunning outright win. He led with 47.6% of votes over conservative activist Leigh Wambsganss’ 36% and former Republican Southlake Mayor John Huffman’s 16%.
It was a remarkable finish for a Democrat running in a Tarrant County-based district that voted for President Donald Trump by more than 17 points last year, and who spent just $68,000 compared to the millions deployed by each of his GOP opponents.
Because nobody won a majority of the votes, Rehmet and Wambsganss will face off in a runoff election, likely in January. Despite coming out of Tuesday on top, Rehmet remains an underdog in the overtime contest, with his nearly 48% support in the first round outweighed by the combined GOP vote for his opponents.
Still, Rehmet’s surprise near-win — and Democratic victories around the country — seemed to offer hope for a beleaguered Texas Democratic Party going into 2026 desperate to reverse course after getting blown out in virtually every statewide race since Trump’s first midterm cycle eight years ago. Some in the party saw Tuesday’s surge as evidence that Democratic turnout and backlash to the Trump administration next year could resemble the blue wave that swept through the nation in 2018 and made Democrats competitive statewide in Texas.
Matthew Wilson, a political science professor at Southern Methodist University, said Rehmet’s overperformance was driven by voters angry with the Trump administration and the broader state of the country.
“The fact that Rehmet did as well as he did speaks to the level of energized anti-Trump sentiment in the Democratic base, and the fact that Republicans going into the midterms have a real turnout and enthusiasm gap that they are going to have to address, or else they’re going to see some surprising and painful losses,” Wilson said.
GOP strategists acknowledged that backlash to the Trump administration and energized Democratic voters could threaten Republicans next year, but warned against drawing conclusions from the Senate District 9 results and other off-year contests.
“I really think it turns on the economy,” Vinny Minchillo, a Plano-based Republican strategist, said. “I hate to read too much into anything like this.”
Rehmet, a union leader, machinist and Air Force veteran, largely stood to the side as his Republican opponents battled each other for the GOP vote. He spent less than half of the $150,000 he raised over the course of his campaign in one of the country’s most expensive media markets. Yet he ran several points ahead of the district’s Democratic nominee in 2022 and Vice President Kamala Harris in 2024, both of whom received about 40% from voters in Senate District 9.
Wambsganss, meanwhile, spent around $1.4 million on her campaign, while Huffman’s bid was largely financed by casino magnate Miriam Adelson and her Las Vegas Sands empire, whose PACs spent some $3.5 million donating to Huffman’s campaign and paying for advertising on his behalf.
“For them to spend several million dollars and for Republican turnout to not be higher and more favorable for the Republicans combined is a pretty good sign in the short term,” said Katherine Fischer, director of Texas Majority PAC, which supported Rehmet’s campaign.
In the long term, Fischer said it was difficult to forecast what Tuesday’s results mean for future contests.
Still, she said that “there’s just no doubt that all election results since November indicate that voters are extremely frustrated with the Trump administration and are punishing Republicans for it.” She noted that Rehmet captured 44% of early votes — even though only 35% of early voters in the race were tagged as likely Democrats.
I covered Rehmet’s overperformance relative to other Democrats in my Wednesday writeup. I have little doubt that Rehmet benefitted from some Democratic enthusiasm relative to Republicans, and as I said he remains an underdog for the runoff. I do hope that this result will get him some attention and support from the broader Democratic community – again, with the acknowledgement that raising his profile and the profile of this race may lead to more Republican engagement as well. I will be checking his next finance report closely, for sure. As Katherine Fischer says later in the article, “If we don’t at least try to win, we would be doing everyone a serious disservice”.
I also want to flag another possibility here, which come via Nate Cohn:
In the Trump era, Democrats have seemed to excel among the highly engaged, highly educated voters who predominate in low-turnout, off-year elections, only to struggle when more irregular and less educated voters flock to the polls in presidential years.
But on Tuesday, when Democrats won the Virginia and New Jersey governor’s races by wide margins, it wasn’t simply because more Democratic-leaning voters showed up to the polls while more Republican-leaning voters sat out. The Democratic candidates also succeeded at winning over a modest but meaningful sliver of President Trump’s supporters, based on exit polls and authoritative voter file records.
[…]
The gold standard for analyzing the electorate is the individual-level records of who voted in an election (but not whom they voted for).
Usually, this data takes months to become available. But New Jersey, nine counties containing nearly half of the state’s electorate have already provided this data for both early and Election Day voters, allowing an unusually early and authoritative look at who cast ballots in 2025 — and their party registrations.
In these counties, Democrats had a roughly 19-point turnout edge by party registration, up from around a 16-point edge among 2024 voters. That’s a net 2.5-point shift (the figures are rounded), and largely consistent with what the exit polls found.
Alone, the net 2.5-point shift in party registration would not explain a nearly nine-point shift toward Ms. Sherrill in these counties (when compared with the 2024 vote for Ms. Harris). More sophisticated modeling, using Times/Siena poll data, shows a similar if slightly more pronounced pattern, with Ms. Sherrill gaining a net 3.5 points because of turnout alone — still not enough to account for her much bigger gains overall.
In other words, the voter records suggest the same thing the exit polls do: Ms. Sherrill benefited from Democrats’ improved turnout, but she benefited even more from flipping some of Mr. Trump’s 2024 supporters to her side.
We don’t have party registration (modulo the recent RPT litigation) but we do know what primaries voters have participated in, and every campaign has models to say who is a likely supporter of themselves or their opponents. If Rehmet got 44% of the early vote from an electorate that they had tagged as about 35% Democratic, then it stands to reason that some of those voters were not Democrats. If some number of people who are not thought of as Democrats are now voting for Democrats, that would seem to portend good things for Democrats, would it not?
I’ve said this a million times in the past and I’m going to say it again: You can’t tell the story of what happened in 2018 in Texas without acknowledging that a lot of people who had been voting Republican in the past voted for Democrats up and down the ballot that year. This is how HD134, a high-turnout mostly white district that voted 56% for Mitt Romney in 2012 then went on to vote 60% for Beto in 2018. That’s not turnout, that’s people voting differently. The same was true for CD07, which at the time was also a high-turnout mostly white district, which included nearly all of HD134.
I don’t know what will happen in this runoff, or more broadly in 2026. I do know that we already have a lot of evidence, even before Tuesday, that a lot of Trump’s surge in Latino support from 2024 is fading significantly. (From that same NYT piece: “The exit polls in New Jersey found that Ms. Sherrill won a whopping 18 percent of Mr. Trump’s Hispanic support in the state”.) That’s sure to have some effect, in SD09 and on the redistricted Congressional map and in the state overall. How much remains to be seen. I think it’s more likely to continue on a path in Dems’ favor between now and next November than it is to retreat, but again we’ll see. Maybe this SD09 runoff will give us some additional evidence. So yeah, we better be trying our best to win it. Daily Kos has more.