Fort Worth Democrat Dan Barrett celebrates his special-election Texas House runoff win over Fort Worth Republican Mark Shelton at the Fox & Hound Sports Grille in southwest Fort Worth, Texas, Dec. 18, 2007.
Brandon Wade
Special to the Star-Telegram
FORT WORTH
To Tarrant County Democrats, it was their breakthrough win after 30 years of losing.
The crowd in a Fort Worth bar shouted and cheered every update as their candidate pulled off a stunning midwinter upset in a special election runoff in a ruby-red Republican district.
Even hundreds of miles away, the headlines screamed about a “Democratic shocker” in Tarrant County. Local Republicans blamed their own no-show voters.
The map of the Texas Senate District 9 special election runoff shows Democrat Taylor Rehmet in blue, winning boxes across Tarrant County into Hurst and Bedford, and Republican Leigh Wambsganss winning Southlake, Keller, Westlake and much of northwest Tarrant County. Tarrant County Election Administration
“Given that his opponent has made this race a referendum on the felon in the White House” — with a written endorsement from President Donald Trump, which Trump says he no longer remembers — Rehmet “stands a better chance of holding on than I did,” Barrett wrote.
Barrett had to work faster than Rehmet.
Under Texas’ old election laws, Barrett had only six weeks to organize for a mid-December 2007 runoff election against Republican Mark Shelton.
In the first round, Shelton had topped five other Republicans, including now-U.S. Rep. Craig Goldman. But more than 7,000 of those voters didn’t come back for the runoff, and Barrett pulled off a 52%-48% surprise in the heavily Republican district.
To the cheering crowd in a Cityview Centre sports bar, it was the greatest moment in nearly 20 years for a Tarrant County Democratic Party that starved while Republicans swept Texas ballots for years under Gov. and President George W. Bush.
But that was the end of the cheers.
Barrett was sworn into the Texas House on Dec. 31, 2007. He worked on off-cycle committee hearings, which Barrett called “hands down the best part of the experience.”
State Rep. Dan Barrett, right, is sworn in Dec. 31, 2007, as state representative for District 97 by his friend Ken McAlister, a notary public. He won a runoff to finish the unexpired term of state Rep. Anna Mowery. Rodger Mallison Star-Telegram archives
The next November, though, President Barack Obama lost Tarrant County to Republican John McCain, 55%-44%. Shelton ousted Barrett by almost that exact margin.
Barrett’s House career ended after just over a year.
“A lot of time and attention was devoted to the November election — far more than I would have preferred,” Barrett wrote.
Shelton, he added, “raised and spent a massive amount of money.”
It’s almost as if losing erased Barrett from memory.
When Wambsganss greeted well-wishers Saturday night at an Italian restaurant in North Richland Hills, she didn’t concede defeat to Rehmet.
She simply said, “We’ll be back in November.”
The victory party is brief. Staying remembered takes longer.
This story was originally published February 2, 2026 at 4:24 AM.
Bud Kennedy is a Fort Worth Star-Telegram opinion columnist. In a 54-year Texas newspaper career, he has covered two Super Bowls, a presidential inauguration, seven national political conventions and 19 Texas Legislature sessions.. Support my work with a digital subscription
Texas’s first major election of 2026 saw Democrat Taylor Rehmet flip a state Senate seat that has long been held by Republicans. The parties disagree on what that means for the November midterm elections.
The race garnered national attention, including from President Donald Trump who pushed voters to get out to the polls for Rehmet’s Republican opponent, Leigh Wambsganss.
Rehmet is a union leader and an airplane mechanic at Lockheed Martin. He now represents most of Tarrant County in Kelly Hancock’s unexpired Senate District 9 seat. He will hold the office until January 2027, when the November general election winner will take over after a rematch between himself and Wambsganss.
Wambsganss works at Patriot Mobile, a phone company that describes itself as Christian and conservative. She said her team will start immediately on the campaign for November.
As the candidates look ahead, some are looking to the Tarrant-county based race as a bellwether for other 2026 races.
“There’s the old statement, ‘As Tarrant County goes, so goes Texas, so goes Texas, and as Texas goes, so goes the nation,’” said Jim Riddlesperger, a TCU Political science professor. “Is that true? I guess we’ll find out in November.”
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The district is both urban and suburban, making it a “cross-section” of where most voters in the United States are.
“And the result of that is that the Republicans are really engaged in looking in the mirror and figuring out what they have to do to turn the tide in the fall,” Riddlesperger said.
Tim Davis, the Tarrant County GOP chair, said he doesn’t think Saturday’s loss means anything in relation to the November general election, though it’s disappointing.
“Did we lose? It looks like it,” Davis said before the results had been finalized. “But what do we learn from that? And how do we go forward from that? That’s what we’re going to learn tonight. I don’t think it’s a bellwether, because Tarrant County really is ruby red.”
Tarrant Democratic Party Chair Allison Campolo said the win is “absolutely a marker of what’s to come” in November for the county and state alike.
Campolo said despite being outspent “10-to-1,” Rehmet flipped a district by 14 points in a special runoff election when Hancock won it in 2022 by 20 points. Trump won the district by 17 points in 2024.
“It’s the future, and it’s here,” Campolo said, promising a blue county in November.
‘Wake up call for Republicans’
As a referendum on Trump, Saturday’s election was a big one, even if it’s for an abbreviated term while the Texas Legislature isn’t in session, Riddlesperger said.
“Yes, Leigh Wambsganss and Taylor Rehmet’s names were on the ballot, but everyone understood what this was, and so this has ramifications, I think, are not just limited to Tarrant County, but are also national,” he said.
Still, it’s important not to overstate the significance of a special election, Riddlesperger cautioned.
Wamganss and other Republicans have cast Saturday’s outcome as a cautionary tale that shouldn’t be repeated in November.
“Tonight is a wakeup call for Republicans in Tarrant County, Texas, and the nation,” she said in an election night statement. “The Democrats were energized. Too many Republicans stayed home.”
Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, a Republican from Houston, agreed with Wambsganss’s statement that the results should be a wakeup call.
The race saw roughly 95,000 ballots cast, according to unofficial election results. In November 2025, about 119,000 ballots were cast in the race between Rehmet, Wambsganss and Republican John Huffman.
“I know the energy and strength the Republican grassroots in Texas possess,” Patrick said. “We will come out fighting with a new resolve, and we will take this seat back in November.”
Asked about the significance of the seat flipping red and contributing factors at his election night watch party, Rehmet said he doesn’t see the race as “red vs. blue.”
“This is right versus wrong,” he said. “This is about public school funding. This is about helping working folks. This is about lowering costs.”
Rehmet said he couldn’t speak to whether the race is a bellwether for November.
“All I can speak to is the hard work that my campaign, the community here, put into this,” Rehmet said.
Democrats tee up for November
The candidates and Republicans and Democrats across the state are already looking to November.
The race is also attracting national attention for both Saturday’s outcome and future implications ahead of the 2026 midterm election
Amanda Litman, co-founder and president of Run for Something, which works to recruit progressive candidates, said the outcome shows that “every seat is winnable” when candidates are embedded in their community and focused on issues that matter most to voters.
DNC Chair Ken Martin highlighted Rehmet’s focus on issues related to rising costs for families, and cast the outcome as a rebuke of Trump.
“Tonight’s results prove that no Republican seat is safe,” Martin said in a statement. “From now until November, Democrats are keeping our foot on the gas and organizing and competing everywhere, including in Texas and the rest of the Sun Belt.”
Fort Worth City Council member Chris Nettles predicted that a Saturday win for Rehmet could also have a trickle-down effect locally, where County Judge Tim O’Hare is up for election in 2026, as are county commissioner seats.
“I think tonight in a highly red area in North Fort Worth turning blue – for whatever reason that may be, Republicans not coming out or Democrats overly coming out – that is going to give us the wisdom and the IDs to help elect people Tarrant County-wide.”
Is there a blue shift happening in Tarrant County?
Riddlesperger said voters do distinguish local politics from national politics, to some degree. That said, Tarrant County has been at a “tipping point” for several years, and Democrats could see success in November if their voters are more energetic in 2026 than Republicans.
“I think we have always had it, but it was always for a higher elected office,” Nettles said Saturday after early voting results were out, pointing to Biden’s 2024 win in Tarrant County as an example. “We just didn’t win local seats, and I think today is a change in that.”
This story was originally published February 1, 2026 at 11:07 AM.
Eleanor (Elly) Dearman is a Texas politics and government reporter for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. She’s based in Austin, covering the Legislature and its impact on North Texas. She grew up in Denton and has been a reporter for more than six years. Support my work with a digital subscription
Rachel Royster is a news and government reporter for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, specifically focused on Tarrant County. She joined the newsroom after interning at the Austin American-Statesman, the Waco Tribune-Herald and Capital Community News in DC. A Houston native and Baylor grad, Rachel enjoys traveling, reading and being outside. She welcomes any and all news tips to her email.
Democrat Taylor Rehmet and Republican Leigh Wambganss are in a Jan. 31 runoff to represent Senate District 9 in North Texas.
Eleanor Dearman
Everything about the special election for a Tarrant County seat in the Texas Senate is unusual — the timing, the first-time candidates for state office and, increasingly, the potential outcome.
Democrat Taylor Rehmet led the first round of voting despite the fact that District 9, covering much of north and west Tarrant County, is solid Republican turf. That was largely because two Republicans split the vote. But Rehmet came close to winning outright, and he’s got a chance to pull off an upset in the runoff against Republican Leigh Wambsganss.
That would be the best outcome for Fort Worth. It’s not that the winner here, whose term will end in early 2027, will sway important legislation. It’s likely that Rehmet or Wambsganss won’t cast a single vote in the Senate, which doesn’t meet this year, until after one of them is elected to a full term in the fall.
A Rehmet victory, though, would send an important message to the Texas and Tarrant County Republican parties: Enough.
Rehmet, a union leader and aircraft machinist, has focused his campaign on economic and quality-of-life concerns. We don’t agree with him on any number of specific issues. But he’s more in tune with everyday voters’ concerns: the price of groceries, the availability of reasonably priced housing, the quality of public schools and the length of their commutes.
He’s not bucking his party on social and cultural issues. But he seems to recognize that they eat up far too much of our political oxygen as serious economic issues stack up.
And if Rehmet, 33, should pull this off, it will be a clear signal to the GOP that it is in danger of going too far to the right and ignoring the needs of Texans beyond the narrowest Republican base. By nominating Wambsganss, a 58-year-old Southlake resident, the party embraced its conservative id. She’s a long-tenured and successful activist who, until launching this campaign, was an executive at Patriot Mobile, the Christian-themed cellular company, and a leader in its political activities.
Texas Republicans need a jolt, a reminder that they should prioritize the biggest concerns of Texas families: education (not just school vouchers), health care (not just restrictions on abortion and gender care) and housing (not just cutting property taxes).
Wambsganss has shown the potential to be an effective senator. She has important connections, including the ear of Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, and she seems to understand that representing nearly a million Texans is different from being a partisan agitator.
If she wins — and the math is still in her favor — we hope she’ll remember that she has to be a senator for Fort Worth and other communities in the district, not just northeast Tarrant County, the power center of the local GOP.
Wambsganss and other Republicans have expressed concern that voters are confused by a late January election taking place even as other candidates battle in partisan primaries. Between that and a winter storm’s potential to dampen early voting, this special election bears watching for its political impact, if not as much for what the officeholder will do.
After all, the main task for either will immediately become to win in November; Wambsganss and Rehmet are unopposed in their party primaries and will face off again for a full-year term.
For now, the winner will complete the term of former Sen. Kelly Hancock, the Republican who resigned to become acting comptroller and run for that office.
Voters in the district can cast ballots at any county location. Early voting began Jan. 21 and ends Jan. 27. Election Day is Jan. 31.
Taylor Rehmet, candidate for Texas Senate District 9
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