Here’s the first real in depth look at Taylor Rehmet and the SD09 special election I’ve seen.
Taylor Rehmet
It was the last week before the start of early voting, in the runoff election for a vacated state Senate seat, and Democratic candidate Taylor Rehmet was tucked into the party room of a Fort Worth brewery, pitching himself to a handful of graying North Texas voters as they picked at cold pizza and mozzarella sticks. Most of the fifteen or so attendees at the January 15 meet and greet were already firm supporters of Rehmet’s once seemingly long shot campaign to flip their ruby-red district blue. But Rehmet, an Air Force veteran and statewide union leader, wasn’t taking any chances. Every vote counts, Rehmet told them. Every door knock matters, he said as they nodded in agreement. After Rehmet concluded his brief stump speech, a forty-something woman asked: What should they tell Republicans who need to be convinced they can support a Democrat? “I would say, ‘Do you care about schools? Do you want to retire with dignity and respect?’” Rehmet responded.
Then he pivoted to the central focus of his campaign: “It’s about unity. We can find enough stuff to disagree about. . . . But I try to find what we do have in common.”
It’s a message that Rehmet has fine-tuned over the last few months, as he’s sought to build a coalition of progressives, disaffected Republicans, union members, and other blue-collar voters in hopes of overcoming a billionaire-funded political machine in a hub of far-right Christian nationalism. What once may have been written off as a quixotic mission has come to be seen as the latest in a referendum on Trumpism—and on the right-wing government of Tarrant County.
Already, Rehmet’s message has proven successful. Late into the evening of November 4, as most of the nation was focused on the blue wave hitting New York City or Virginia, Rehmet and his campaign were on the verge of what would have been the biggest upset of the night. Despite being outspent by millions of dollars, he nearly won outright over two Republican candidates, Leigh Wambsganss and John Huffman, in the open special election for Senate District 9, a plus-seventeen-point Trump district that includes north Fort Worth and its dark-red suburbs, and which has not elected a Democrat since 1991. Rehmet is now headed for a January 31 runoff election against Wambsganss, a longtime conservative activist and leader of Patriot Mobile, a cell phone service company with a political arm that funds Christian nationalist candidates in Texas. Early voting started this week.
Legislatively, the outcome of the race is essentially meaningless: The winner will serve out the remaining term of Kelly Hancock, who resigned his Senate seat in June after being appointed by Governor Greg Abbott to Texas comptroller. A rematch is expected between Rehmet and Wambsganss during the November general election. (The Texas Legislature does not reconvene until January 2027.) But symbolically, one expert said, a Rehmet victory would represent a political earthquake—a stunning rebuke of a movement that has for years used the region as an incubator for far-right policies that are exported across the state and nation.
“If he were to lose by six points, that’d be worth talking about,” Calvin Jillson, a political science professor at nearby Southern Methodist University, told me. “And if Rehmet were to win? You’d say, ‘Holy shit.’”
[…]
Rehmet, a gregarious, dark-blond 33-year-old, was born in Garland, just northeast of Dallas, raised by an airline mechanic and a salon worker. He joined the Air Force at nineteen and served four years on active duty before moving to Fort Worth for a job at Lockheed Martin, where he is also an aircraft mechanic. He was eventually elected president of the local and state chapters of the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers, advocating on behalf of his union for better workplace safety and benefits. That work, he told me, was illuminating: He recalled one moment, in 2025, when he testified before a Texas House committee, advocating for legislation that would have required the Texas Workforce Commission to provide posters on veterans’ benefits to the workers of any company with more than fifty employees. “It died in a GOP committee,” he said with frustration. “There are simple, low-cost things that benefit real people in a meaningful way. And you can only imagine what other things we would be able to do if we had legislators focusing on veterans and on working Texans.”
Reaching such voters has been no easy feat, given the campaign’s limited financial resources, the massive size of Tarrant County, and the fact that many of its 2.2 million residents don’t even know a runoff is underway. Rehmet’s campaign says it has spent most of the last two months in an all-out blitz, knocking on some 30,000 doors in every city in Senate District 9; showing up at food drives and parades; speaking at union shops scattered across the district; and trying to redirect voter dissatisfaction into a durable movement based on working-class solidarity.
[…]
Jillson, the political science professor, said it’s likely that the outcome of the upcoming election will hinge on where Huffman’s share of the vote lands. Most Huffman supporters, he said, will likely shift to Wambsganss. But Jillson said Wambsganss’s history of political activism—and voters’ broader discontent with the local far right—could be polarizing enough to keep some at home or even push some of Huffman’s supporters, like Whitley, to cast ballots for Rehmet.
Some of the rhetoric from Wambsganss may prove alienating to Huffman voters, he said. At one point, Wambsganss reportedly ran an advertisement that claimed Huffman was a shill for special interests connected to “communist China.” And in late October, when a manipulated photo that depicted her wearing an upside-down crucifix emerged, she accused her opponent of being behind the doctored image. She called the alleged tactic “demonic,” and suggested that the race was a “spiritual” battle. Huffman’s campaign denied it was behind the image. “Once someone calls you the devil, where are you going?” Jillson wondered. “And where would your voters go?”
It’s good stuff, so read the rest. One point the story goes into is how Tarrant County Republicans have gone increasingly hard right as Tarrant County itself has become more purple. There was a time when Tarrant County was almost exactly as Republican as the state was, going be Presidential and other election results. That hasn’t been the case since 2018, when it moved several points to the left. If it does even a little bit more of that this year, a whole lot of good results, at the county level and in State Rep races, could result. Might even put districts like CD24 and yes, SD09, in play. (SD10 is not on the ballot this year.) Let’s see what happens on January 31 first, and see what the reaction to it is. In the meantime, if you’re in a position to help out Taylor Rehmet’s campaign, please do so.
UPDATE: Rehmet has raised a few bucks for the runoff, but he’s still wildly outraised and outspent by Wambsganss and her army of wealthy overlords. Which would add to the magnitude of a Rehmet victory if he achieves it.