What To Take from the Democratic Candidate's Win in the SD 9 Special Election Runoff Election

 

The Facts:

The Democratic Party’s candidate won decisively over the Republican Party’s candidate in a runoff election in Texas’ SD 9, which was vacated by Kelly Hancock when he became acting Texas Comptroller of Public Accounts. The total vote was 94,880 votes, of which Taylor Rehmet won 54,280 votes to Leigh Wambsganss’ 40,600 votes. Rehmet won both the early vote and the Election Day vote decisively.

In the 2022 General Election, the last general election in this district, Republican Kelly Hancock won the district decisively:

Candidate	Party	Absentee Voting	Early Voting	Election Day Voting	Total
Kelly Hancock	Rep	4,239	110.586	51,864	166,689
Gwenn Burud	Dem	4,717	73,364	32,742	110,823
Total Vote		8.956	183,950	84,606	277,512

Table 1: SD 9 State Senate District 9, November 2022
Context:

The district boundaries changed in January 2023. The maps of the district before and after redistricting:

              Figure 1: SD 9 before and after redistricting.

Senate District 9 was not on the ballot in 2024; so the effect of redistricting on the composition of the district is difficult to determine.

To understand the significance of Rehmet’s victory in the SD 9 runoff election, some context is necessary. In Texas, special elections to fill a vacancy are called by the governor. The special election to fill the SD 9 seat was held on November 8, 4, 2025. In special elections, the political parties do not hold a primary election or convention to select their nominees. The candidates for the position gain access to the ballot either by getting signatures of registered voters in the district on petitions or by paying a filing fee. Candidates on the ballot are listed with their party affiliation. This is the result of the SD 9 Senate District special election in November 2025:

Candidate	Party	Absentee Voting	Early Voting	Election Day Voting	Total
Taylor Rehmet	Dem	705	28,081	27,720	56,506
Leigh Wambsganss	Rep	391	25,790	16,5531	42,712
John Huffman	Rep	190	10,053	9,348	19,591
Votes Cast		1,286	63,924	53,599	118,809

Table 2: SD 9 Special Election, November 4, 2025

Since no candidate received a majority of the vote, a runoff election was scheduled for January 31, 2026. As noted, Democrat Taylor Rehmet won the election with 57 percent of the vote to Republican Leigh Wambsganss’ 42 percent of the vote:

Candidate	Party	Absentee Voting	Early Voting	Election Day Voting	Total
Leigh Wambsganss	Rep	608	19,375	20,617	40,600
Taylor Rehmet	Dem	1,115	24,571	28594	54,280
Total Vote		1,723	43,946	49,211	94,880

Table 3: SD 9 Special Election Runoff, January 31, 2026

Analysis by the Media:

The consensus among the media is that the Republican Party of Texas should be concerned about the loss of a Republican seat in the Texas Senate and make changes to fix the causes of the defeat. For example, CNN reported:

A Democratic win in a special election in solidly red Texas is sparking a new wave of warnings from Republicans on Capitol Hill about finetuning messaging and revving up turnout heading into the midterm elections.

“It should be a warning, and I think we’ve got to respond,” said Rep. Don Bacon of Nebraska, adding President Donald Trump won on border and inflation issues and “if we were to focus on that and still focus on that, I think we’d be a lot better off.”

Nine months until the November elections, Republican angst over a double-digit Democratic victory in a state Senate district Trump won by 17 points in 2024 is settling in from Texas to the nation’s capital.

Bloomberg emphasized a shift in party and candidate preferences by Hispanic voters:

Big shifts among Latino voters fueled a Texas Democrat’s upset victory in a state senate district in the Fort Worth area that’s been dominated by Republicans for more than three decades, according to an analysis of results from the Jan. 31 election.

In one precinct of the city’s heavily Latino Northside neighborhood, 81% of voters picked Democrat Taylor Rehmet, a labor union leader. In the same precinct in 2024, by contrast, 51% chose President Donald Trump, who praised Rehmet’s GOP rival before the Jan. 31 vote. Several nearby precincts backed Rehmet at 90% or more compared with about 60% for Kamala Harris in 2024.

 

The Texas Tribune offered a more comprehensive explanation:

Rehmet’s upset victory, according to interviews Sunday with half a dozen people who supported or worked on his campaign, is explained by a variety of factors, including the combination of Latino and suburban backlash to once-fringe conservative policies that have taken root in Tarrant County and Washington; a MAGA opponent who drove some of those policies and embraced them on the campaign trail; and a message from Rehmet, centered on his union background, that won over working-class voters, independents and even some moderate Republicans.

Instrumental to Rehmet’s victory was the backing he received from Hispanics, who account for slightly more than one in five eligible voters in the district. One analyst found that Rehmet outperformed Harris, the 2024 Democratic presidential nominee, by more than 50 points in some of the largely Hispanic areas of Fort Worth. The remarkable shifts occurred as those voters witnessed immigration agents in recent weeks kill two Americans while trying to carry out the president’s promised mass deportations. And those same voters, some observers noted, believed Trump would help their financial standing more than what he has delivered in his first year in office.

A leading Texas newspaper, The Dallas Morning News commented that “In a shocking upset and a possible bellwether for this year’s midterm elections, Democrat Taylor Rehmet won a runoff Saturday for a conservative Tarrant County state Senate seat by a wide margin. In unofficial results, Rehmet bested Republican Leigh Wambsganss by 14.4 percentage points in a low-turnout election. It was a huge swing for a district that favored President Donald Trump by 17 percentage points in 2024.”

My Analysis:

Of course, the media analyses are not wrong, but they are, in most cases, insufficient. What other factors should be considered?

1.      Voter Turnout: Voter turnout in Texas special elections is generally lower than in general elections. Note that the election in November 2025 drew only 118,809 voters. In runoff elections, such as the January 2026 election, turnout is very low. There were more than 619,000 registered voters in SD 9 in 2026, but only 94,880 bothered to vote in the runoff election. That is a meager 15.33 percent of registered votes (NOTE: although the number of votes cast was 94, 880, the number of voters who voted in the SD 9 contest was 94,886).

2.      Campaign Contributions and Spending: Leigh Wambsganss raised more than 2.52 million dollars to fuel her campaign. On the other hand, Rehmet raised $356,509. Contributions to Wambsganss came mostly from PACs and large contributions. Texans for Lawsuit Reform contributed $350,000. About 217 individuals and PACs contributed to Wambsganss’ campaign. For Rehmet’s 1,860 donors, the average contribution was $116.  Forty-eight percent of Rehmet’s contributions were less than $500. Wambsganss spent about 10 times as much as Rehmet ($2,423,985 to $242,174).

3.      Who Was Likely to Vote: In low voter turnout elections, the people who are most likely to vote are registered voters who are strong partisans. They are more attached to their party and its success than weak partisans, partisan leaning independents, or pure independents. The less attached to a party a registered voter is, the less likely s/he is to vote in such an election. So, it’s safe to conclude that most voters were strong or weak partisans. According to Ross Hunt, the voters were predominately Republican Partisans (See Figure 2 below).

                   Figure 2: Partisanship of voters in SD 9 runoff.

4.      What motivates a voter to vote: There are both positive and negative motivations to participate in an election. Strong partisans are more likely to have positive motivations for voting; partisan leaners and independents are more likely to have negative motivations. Strong partisans want desperately for their party to win. Partisan leaners and independents want desperately for their disfavored party or candidate to lose.

5.      Which Motivation is stronger: For strong partisans, we noted that the motivation to vote is positive. Positive motivation lasts longer, producing more consistent results. For partisan leaners, the motivation is negative. Negative motivation tends to be stronger, but its longevity is shorter. Thus, many of the voters chose Rehmet because they disliked the Republican Party or its candidate. 

6.      Why would voters dislike Wambsganss: In Tarrant County, the Republican Party fostered a campaign to elect extremely conservative candidates to local school boards. Leigh Wambsganss was a leader in that effort and was prominently featured in the campaigns. Many voters were disturbed by the campaign and its success in electing school board members. Many noted that these members were injecting partisan issues into the school boards’ decisions. The boards, in their eyes, had been politicized. They were not happy.

7.      Campaign messages: In several interviews, Rehmet emphasized that he listened more than he talked when interacting with potential voters. He wanted to know what issues were important to them. He noted that they stressed affordability and public education. Wambsganss emphasized standard Texas GOP talking points: defending the Second Amendment, ensuring every child a good education, increasing the homestead exemption, supporting the Texas oil and gas industry, protecting women’s sports and private spaces, securing the border, and supporting law enforcement.

8.      Precinct results: The precinct results showed that many precincts had moved from Republican to Democratic in the runoff election (see Figure 3 below).

Figure 3: Precincts won by party in the 2026 SD 9 runoff.

                    Note: Precincts with zero votes were seemingly awarded to a candidate. 

                  A closer look at individual precincts magnifies the low voter turnout. There are 379 precincts in SD 9. Consider the following data:

# Votes	0	1-100	101-500	501-999	1000+
# PCTs	53	90	179	54	3

 Of the 53 precincts with zero votes, 42 precincts had no registered voters. Registered voters resided in only 11 precincts that recorded zero votes. The mode was between 101 and 500 votes, and only three precincts had more than 1,000 votes cast. The mean for the precincts was 250 votes.

 In the 2024 general election, Republican Donald J. Trump won 217 of the precincts that are in SD9. In the 2026 special election runoff, Democrat Rehmet won 245 of the precincts in SD 9. Rehmet won 133 precincts that Donald J. Trump had won in 2024. Republican Wambsganss won only 74 precincts that Donald Trump had won in 2024. She only won 133 precincts in total.

Both Trump in 2024 and Wambsganss in 2026 won in 74 precincts. In those 74 precincts, she only won 3 precincts by a larger percentage of the vote than Trump.   Wambsganss’ percentage over Trump’s percentage ranged from 4.09 percent to 39.13 percent of the vote. In one precinct, both Trump and Wambsganss won 100% of the vote. In the remaining 70 precincts, Trump’s percentage of the vote exceeded Wambsganss’ percentage by as little as 2.75 percent to as large as 19.35 percent. A majority of the differences (43 precincts) had a difference of 10 to 20 percent.

My Takeaway:

What does Rehmet’s victory mean for the Texas political parties heading into the November 2026 general election? In November 2026, Wambsganss and Rehmet will meet again in the general election. Will the result be the same? The answer is: maybe. It depends more on the actions taken by the Texas GOP and candidate Wambsganss than on the Texas Democratic Party and candidate Rehmet. Voter turnout should be higher in the general election, but who will vote? If the number of partisans, both strong and weak, increases substantially, Wambsganss should do better. If the number of independents, especially independents who are partisan leaners, increases, Rehmet should do better. If the animosity toward the Texas Republican Party and/or Wambsganss remains high, Wambsganss might well be in trouble. Is nine months sufficient to eliminate or radically reduce the hostility toward Wambsganss?

 

A major caveat is that making a prediction nine months before an election is difficult, even after what is viewed by many people as a major upset in a runoff election following an indecisive special election to fill a vacant Texas Senate seat. I propose that pundits should consider what just happened. Is it really a major event and a turning point? Or is a blip in the larger scheme of partisan politics in Texas?