Revealed: The staggering shift that toppled a MAGA activist in red state upset

by Alejandro Serrano and Apurva Mahajan, The Texas Tribune

February 6, 2026

Democrat Taylor Rehmet’s recent upset victory over a MAGA star to represent a reliably red Texas Senate district was, at least in part, due to a significant leftward shift by Latino voters. These maps help illustrate the point.

Precincts in Senate District 9 with a majority of Hispanic residents swung on average 34 percentage points toward Rehmet compared to the margin garnered by the Democratic nominee in 2022, when the seat was last on the ballot.

Across the entire district, VoteHub estimated that Rehmet captured about 79% of the Hispanic vote, a 26-point improvement on the 53% that went for Democrat Kamala Harris in 2024 — the biggest shift of any racial group in the district.

The upshot was a decisive 14-point win for Rehmet, an Air Force veteran and union leader, over GOP activist Leigh Wambsganss in last weekend’s special election runoff.

Rehmet’s victory will be short-lived. The contest was to finish the term of Kelly Hancock, who left the Senate seat to become Texas’ acting comptroller. Rehmet and Wambsganss will face each other again in November.

No less, the January election has garnered national attention because of Rehmet’s comfortable winning margin in a district that Hancock, a Republican, won in 2022 by 20 points — two years before Trump carried it by a similar margin.

It remains early to detect what the results suggest for November’s midterm elections, if anything. But they present a fresh reminder of the significance of the Latino vote in Texas — and beyond — and the political danger for down-ballot Republicans if they see their support erode among the state’s growing Latino voting bloc.

Following Trump’s 2024 victory — in which exit polls showed him capturing 55% of Texas’ Latino vote — much of the attention centered on the state’s historically Democratic and heavily Latino border counties. Trump won 14 out of the 18 Texas counties within 20 miles of the border, including all four in the Rio Grande Valley.

Less-documented, however, has been the inroads made by Trump and the Texas GOP with Latinos — who account for the largest share of the state’s population — in the state’s largest metro areas. The special election in Senate District 9, which covers about half of Fort Worth and many of its surrounding suburbs complicates the narrative some more, suggesting a contraction back toward Democrats among Latino voters.

A Texas Tribune analysis of precinct-level results shows that Rehmet won by an average margin of 59 percentage points in the voting precincts where more than 60% of the population is Hispanic. In 2022, the Democratic nominee, Gwenn Burud, carried those same precincts by a much narrower 26-point average margin.

Hispanic Texans account for slightly more than one in five eligible voters in Senate District 9, according to U.S. Census Bureau data.

Overall, roughly 83% of precincts in the district — 301 out of 364 — shifted to Democrats from the 2022 general election to Saturday’s runoff. Such swings are to be expected, to a degree, as midterm elections often favor the party that is not running the White House. But not to this level, according to political observers.

In 40 precincts, Democrats saw a surge of more than 50 percentage points their way. Fifteen of those precincts are majority Hispanic.

The apparent erosion of Latino support for the GOP has emboldened Democrats in Texas and Washington, at least for now.

Fresh off the runoff, Texas Democratic leaders are eyeing red-leaning congressional districts from the Texas-Mexico border to cities, including newly drawn districts in the Houston and San Antonio areas, with significant Hispanic populations.

”We are leaving no stone unturned in this election,” Texas Democratic Party Chair Kendall Scudder said on a press call this week. “Whether you were in Dumas or you were in Dallas, you deserve investment from our party, and we intend to show up and fight back.”

This article first appeared on The Texas Tribune.