Blue wave watch: Democrat flips Trump +17 Texas Senate seat in 32-point swing

A nerdy look at precinct-level data from the TX SD-9 special election

I am not going to make a habit of covering breaking news, but when there’s a chart to be made, I really just can’t help myself.

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Democratic candidate Taylor Rehmet has won a special election for Texas State Senate District 9 in Tarrant County — a seat Donald Trump carried by 17 points in November 2024, per The Downballot. As I’m writing this, approximately 99% of the vote has been counted, and Rehmet carried the seat 57.2% vs his Republican challenger, Leigh Wambsganss, at 42.8%. That’s a 14.4-point margin, and a 31.4-point swing vs Harris’s margin in 2024 (if you ignore votes for minor-party candidates, the swing rounds up to D+32).

This swing of 32 points from Trump’s 2024 performance is the largest Democratic overperformance in a competitive special election since Trump took office. Some other margins in competitive seats include the following:

Since Trump took office, Democrats have flipped eight Republican-held state legislative seats in special elections across five states. Republicans have flipped zero Democratic seats.

The average swing across these eight flips is 19 points. Tonight’s 32-point swing in Texas blew past that.

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I. Big swings everywhere

Looking at precinct-level (technically “vote centers” in Tarrant County) data from TX-SD-9, Rehmet outperformed Kamala Harris’s 2024 numbers nearly everywhere — with pretty uniform gains across the map.

If you’re more of a map person, here is 2024 POTUS in all of Tarrant County vs the 2026 Senate special (just SD-9 precincts):

Notice that the swing to Democrats was not confined just to the suburbs or just the cities. This was a big blue shift everywhere. If anything, Democrats are doing just a bit better in the urban core — which would match the results from 2025, when Democrats outperformed with younger voters and Latinos.

II. What this means for November

There are two reasons for the swing: persuasion (voters breaking hard against Republicans) and Republican dropoff (Trump voters staying home). The second scatter below shows that vote centers with lower turnout relative to 2024 saw the biggest Democratic swings.

While special elections don’t predict the exact margin of a future general election, turnout patterns can be revealing. Democrats are unlikely to get the full D+32 swing across the country that they got in TX SD-9. But if you take the relationship above and predict the swing we’d see in a higher-turnout election (in Texas, the 2022 midterms had 70% the turnout of 2024), you get a D+9 swing. That would put the generic House vote at D+7.

Of course, lots of assumptions are being made here, so don’t consider this a concrete prediction. I’ve done the same analysis in other special elections, and generally gives the same result. Sometimes the data is more R-leaning, sometimes more D-leaning.

On the other hand, due to public backlash against his agenda of mass deportations and unrestrained enforcement against unauthorized residents and U.S. citizens, political conditions have been deteriorating quickly for the president this month. It’s likely that if this election were held a month ago, the Republican candidate would have done better.

The ICE shootings are a tipping point

The point is this: A big wave is gathering for 2026. There is at present no question of the existence of this wave, just its height. For Democrats, tonight is another piece of evidence that the 2026 midterms are going to be a good year for them (if the elections are free and fair, which is not guaranteed). The environment could grow more or less favorable for them in the next 9 months.

And, coming back to my home, the Lone Star state, if tonight is any indication, Republicans should be worried about holding onto Texas in this year’s Senate race. Especially if Ken Paxton wins the primary.

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