Democrat flips Trump +17 Texas Senate seat in 32-point swing
I’m not going to make a habit of covering the news, but when there’s a chart to make, I really can’t help it.
Democratic candidate Taylor Rehmet won a special election for Texas State Senate District 9 in Tarrant County – a seat Donald Trump won by 17 points in November 2024, according to The negative vote. As of this writing, approximately 99% of the votes have been counted and Rehmet won the seat with 57.2% over his Republican challenger, Leigh Wambsganss, with 42.8%. That’s a margin of 14.4 points, and a gap of 31.4 points from Harris’ margin in 2024 (if you ignore votes for minor party candidates, the gap rounds to D+32).
This 32-point change from Trump’s 2024 performance marks the largest Democratic outperformance in a competitive special election since Trump took office. Some other margins in competitive seats are:
Since Trump took office, Democrats have flipped eight Republican-held legislative seats in special elections in five states. Republicans did not flip any Democratic seats.
The average swing over these eight flips is 19 points. Tonight’s 32-point swing at Texas exceeded that figure.
Looking at TX-SD-9 data at the precinct level (technically Tarrant County’s “voting centers”), Rehmet outperformed Kamala Harris’s 2024 numbers almost everywhere – with fairly even gains across the map.
If you’re more of a map enthusiast, here’s the 2024 POTUS in all of Tarrant County compared to the 2026 Senate special (SD-9 district only):
Note that the shift to Democrats was not limited to just the suburbs or cities. It was a big change to blue everywhere. On the contrary, the Democrats are doing a little better in the urban core – which match 2025 resultswhen Democrats outperformed among younger voters and Latinos.
There are two reasons for this shift: persuasion (voters are violently opposed to Republicans) and Republican decline (Trump voters are staying home). The second scatter below shows that voting centers with lower turnout compared to 2024 saw the biggest Democratic swings.
Although special elections do not predict the exact margin of a future general election, turnout trends can be telling. Democrats across the country are unlikely to get the full D+32 swing they got in TX SD-9. But if you take the relationship above and predict the change we would see in a higher turnout election (in Texas, the 2022 midterm elections had 70% turnout compared to 2024), you get a swing at D+9. This would place the House’s generic vote at D+7.
Of course, there are a lot of assumptions being made here, so don’t take this as a concrete prediction. I have done the same analysis in other special elections and generally give the same result. Sometimes the data is more R-oriented, sometimes more D-oriented.
On the other hand, due to public backlash against his agenda of mass deportations and unbridled crackdown on illegal residents and U.S. citizens, political conditions have deteriorated rapidly for the president this month. It is likely that if this election had taken place a month ago, the Republican candidate would have done better.
ICE shootings are a turning point
The bottom line is this: a big wave is brewing for 2026. There is currently no question of the existence of this wave, only its height. For Democrats, tonight is further proof that the 2026 midterm elections will be a good year for them (if the elections are free and fair, which is not guaranteed). The environment could become more or less favorable for them in the next 9 months.
And, coming back to my home state, the Lone Star State, if tonight is any indication, Republicans should be worried about being able to hold on to Texas in this year’s Senate race. Especially if Ken Paxton wins the primary.
If you value this type of data-driven policy analysis, consider subscribing to support my work. Paid subscribers allow me to continue to crunch the numbers and create these charts whenever the news demands it. (And I had to stay up pretty late to merge the 2026 and 2024 riding data files.)
