The outcome of a state Senate special election in Texas has emboldened Democrats as they seek to score upsets in five congressional districts redrawn to the advantage of the GOP ahead of the upcoming midterm elections.
Democrat Taylor Rehmet, an Air Force veteran and machinist at a Lockheed Martin fighter jet plant, flipped a deep-red state Senate district in the Dallas-Fort Worth area that President Donald Trump won by 17 percentage points in the 2024 election. The union president won the special election Saturday by 14 points against Republican Leigh Wambsganss, who outspent Rehmet 6-to-1 and received a glowing endorsement by Trump on social media. Rehmet’s win has alarmed House Republicans.
The 30-plus-point swing toward Democrats has raised questions about whether the White House’s successful push to redraw congressional districtlines in Texas last year was worth the gamble. Democrats are increasingly confident they can blunt Republican gains, largely because they have recruited candidates like Rehmet: moderates from working-class backgrounds who are campaigning on kitchen-table issues and emphasizing governance over partisan politics.
The races in Texas are among those that will be key to determining which party controls the U.S. House, where Republicans maintain a razor-thin majority.
“At what point will Republican extremists come to the conclusion that your reach ain’t long enough, and your peeps ain’t strong enough?” Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-New York) said at a news conference this week, quoting rap artist Jay-Z. Jeffries predicted that Democrats could win up to four or the five redistricted seats designed to install Republicans.
The White House launched a countrywide redistricting pushin Texas last year after Trump convinced state Republicans to redraw congressional district lines in an attempt to bulk up House Republicans’ narrow majority in the midterm elections. California and other Democratic states also moved to change their maps to counter expected Republican gains elsewhere, setting off an unusual mid-decade restricting effort for partisan benefit. States redraw congressional lines every 10 years based on population data collected by the U.S. Census Bureau.
Rehmet’s win is the latest in which Democratic candidates have flipped GOP-held seats in special elections since Trump became president last year — most notably in states Trump won, including Iowa, Pennsylvania and Mississippi. In that same time frame, four Democratic candidates running in congressional special elections overperformed Vice President Kamala Harris’s 2024 numbers by at least 17 percentage points, according to an internal analysis from the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, the party’s House campaign arm.
The flip in the Lone Star state is also significant given the vast size of state Senate districts in Texas. Unlike in most states, they are more populous than congressional districts, making special elections a more representative sample of voter sentiment.
Like many Republicans, Rep. Richard Hudson (North Carolina) warned against reading into the Texas special election result as a predictor of what could happen in congressional midterms roughly nine months from now. But Hudson, who chairs the National Republican Congressional Committee, the House GOP’s campaign arm, acknowledged the election nevertheless “underscores the importance of turnout, and the fact that, in an off year, our voters are lower-propensity.”
Republicans also believe that moderate Democrats running in safe Trump districts may be jeopardized if Rep. Jasmine Crockett (D-Texas), an outspoken liberal with a massive social media following, is atop the Democratic ticket in November. She is running in next month’s U.S. Senate primary against state Rep. James Talarico.
Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas), who is up for reelection this year, agreed that lower voter turnout played a role last week, but said “to have that sort of swing is a cause for introspection and trying to figure out what lessons [Republicans] should learn from this.”
The results also caught the attention of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) who posted on X that “a swing of this magnitude is not something that can be dismissed. Republicans should be clear-eyed about the political environment heading into the midterms.”
Rep. Tony Gonzales (R-Texas) said that any Republican who dismisses Saturday night’s result as just a rogue special election is missing the point. He said that if Republicans want to take advantage of mid-decade redistricting, “we have to get the right candidates, we have to get the right messaging, and we got to get the right support.”
On that front, Democrats believe they have the upper hand. They have centered an anti-Trump message on economic issues, specifically pointing out that the Trump administration has done little to lower high prices as promised. They argue that a House Democratic majority is needed to hold his administration accountable.
House Democrats have also focused heavily on recruiting candidates with working-class backgrounds that resonate in swing districts and deep-red regions across the country. They have sought to avoid wading into the culture-war traps that have alienated moderate Democratic and independent voters in recent years.
Doing that has not been easy.
Rep. Vicente Gonzalez (D) has represented a swing district in Texas’s Rio Grande Valley for almost a decade and repeatedly warned party leaders that Democrats were losing support among voters for using rhetoric against law enforcement and embracing far-left positions that were pushing Latino and moderates toward the GOP. Democratic losses in some predominantly liberal and seemingly safe House districts in 2024 seems to have convinced a new team of party leaders to listen more to Gonzalez and other moderate Democrats who represent districts Trump has repeatedly won.
After Texas Republicans created five new seats that favor Republicans through redistricting, Democrats recognized the need to find candidates that could be compete in such hostile terrain. Gonzalez and Rep. Henry Cuellar (D-Texas), who has served his Rio Grande Valley for more than two decades, are running in newly drawn districts that Trump would have won by 10 percentage points had they existed in 2024. Both lawmakers are also part of the centrist Blue Dog Coalition, the smallest ideological faction within the House Democratic caucus, which has ramped up its involvement in recruiting like-minded candidates and advocating that the Democratic campaign arms get behind them early.
Gonzalez’s wife indirectly recruited Bobby Pulido to challenge GOP Rep. Monica De La Cruz in a newly expansive South Texas district that Trump would have won by 18 points. Pulido, a political science major turned Tejano superstar, said he knew Rehmet’s race would be close but was stunned by the returns he saw scrolling on his phone at a Grammys party for nominated artists. Pulido said he believed he knew the reason for the win.
“A lot of voters are like, ‘Look, I voted for Trump because I thought he was going to be like the first time, which wasn’t that bad. Then I see this, and it’s crazy,’” Pulido said in an interview. “I don’t think many independents are giving him the benefit of that anymore.”
Voters’ disillusionment with the Republican Party has given Pulido, whose music fame has afforded him name recognition in the district, an inroad to convincing voters to support his candidacy. He has shocked fans and friends alike by telling them he’s a Democrat despite living, like them, in the conservative Republican district.
Johnny Garcia is also trying to redefine for voters what it means to be a Democrat in a new district outside of San Antonio — one that Trump would have carried by 10 points. Garcia, a former Bexar County sheriff who describes himself as an “old-school Democrat,” has found that voters presume Democratic lawmakers are all far-leftists who do not want to find consensus. He has won over voters by telling them that, as a law enforcement officer, he has never answered a dispatch call by asking whether those in the emergency situation are Democrats or Republican, and that he expects to operate in a similar way in Congress.
Democrats recognize that they have an uphill battle to win in districts Trump would have won by significant margins, despite the momentum they are sensing on the ground. First, the more moderate candidates in the redrawn districts must win primaries next month before advancing to the general election. Blue Dog Action PAC, a nonprofit group working to elect moderate Democrats, is putting its first six-figure independent expenditure behind Garcia to shore up his chances in a crowded primary and avoid a runoff.
“While the trend line for Democrats is good right now, it’s still a long way to November, and there’s no sense in counting chickens before they’re hatched,” said Phil Gardner, co-founder and senior adviser at Blue Dog Action. “If we’re going to win these seats, then the party has to be a big-tent party. Every past Democratic majority is built on the backs of Blue Dogs and so will the next Democratic majority.”
Theodoric Meyer contributed to this report.
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