Republicans have faced a bitter blow after a set of special election results on Sunday morning revealed that a former GOP stronghold has flipped to the Democrats.
On the state level, Democrat Taylor Rehmet flipped the 9th District in the Texas State Senate, defeating Republican Leigh Wambsganss in a runoff.
The Fort Worth-area district went for Donald Trump by 17 points in 2024 – and the sweeping win this weekend could offer warning signs for Republicans ahead of this November’s midterm elections.
The president had urged his supporters to vote for Wambsganss in Saturday’s election in a Truth Social post.
Rehmet, a veteran of the US Air Force and current labor union leader, dedicated the victory to everyday working people.
With 95 percent of the election results tallied, Rehmet led Wambsganss by over 14,000 votes despite being outspent nearly 10-1, by over $2.2 million.
Conservative radio host Dana Loesch, who lives in the area, noted on X that ‘any tale that this is a harbinger for Trump or midterms is stupid,’ while also acknowledging that the ‘GOP has to figure out how to win without Trump on the ballot.’
Democratic National Committee Chairman Ken Martin argued that Rehmet’s win was not an ‘anomaly’ but a ‘pattern.’
Republican Leigh Wambsganss lost the election in Texas on Saturday night
Taylor Rehmet, a union president and Air Force veteran, won the 9th District in the Texas State Senate overnight – which was an area that Trump won by a landslide in the presidential election
‘Democrats are building on our historic overperformance, and we’re not slowing down. November is coming, and we’re ready,’ Martin wrote in his own X post.
A congressional special election was also held to fill the term of former Representative Sylvester Turner, a Texas Democrat who passed away in March of 2025.
Christian D. Menefee won a special Democratic-on-Democratic runoff election for the US House of Representatives seat in Texas’s 18th District, serving the next 11 months to complete Turner’s term in the deep-blue seat.
Menefee is already running for a full term in the 2026 midterms in a seat with different boundaries after Texas mid-decade congressional redistricting last year.
Texas Democrats are sure to use Saturday’s special election results in the State Senate to draw money and attention to the marquee Texas race for the U.S. Senate, set to take place later this year.
On the GOP front, incumbent Texas Senator John Cornyn is facing two formidable opponents in his own primary in Texas: Attorney General Ken Paxton and US House of Representatives member Wesley Hunt.
In the Democratic Primary, progressive firebrand Jasmine Crockett, who currently serves in the US House of Representatives, is facing off against James Talarico, a Texas state representative.
Most national advocacy groups are staying out of the Texas Senate race on both sides because of the competitiveness of the primaries, and neither President Donald Trump nor Texas Senator Ted Cruz, who won’t be up for reelection until 2030, are endorsing a Republican in the primaries.
President Donald Trump endorsed a losing candidate in a Texas special election district he won by 17 points in 2024. He is seen here speaking with reporters aboard Air Force One as he travels from Joint Base Andrews, Maryland to West Palm Beach, Florida on Saturday, January 31, 2026
Rehmet (right) dedicated the victory to everyday working people
Pictured: Leigh Wambsganss and her husband, Andy
This comes as Trump is facing his own reckoning as his approval rating sinks to a record low following the shootings of Alex Pretti and Renee Good by immigration officers in Minneapolis.
An exclusive Daily Mail/JL Partners poll shows Trump at 45 percent approval, his equal worst ever showing in the survey, down two points from last week. It reveals 55 percent of Americans now disapprove of his overall performance.
Worst of all for Trump, immigration, his signature issue for the last decade, is now proving to be an albatross around his neck, one of the areas where he has least support. Just 39 percent approve of his handling of the issue, with 47 percent disapproving.
According to the Daily Mail poll, 53 percent of voters say the chaos in Minneapolis has been a ‘turning point’ moment for them personally. That includes 39 percent of Republicans.
It marks, without question, a key watershed in his presidency.
Whether it proves the start of an interminable decline, or a nadir from which he will bounce back, is now up to Trump as he seeks to extricate himself from the political quicksand rising around him.
The zealousness with which ICE has pursued its mission is now the number one driver of disapproval of the president, the Daily Mail poll revealed.
The Texas State Capitol is seen in Austin, Texas in an image captured on June 1, 2021
It showed 28 percent of Americans rank that as the main reason for their disapproval of Trump, a surge of 10 points from before the shooting of Pretti by immigration officers in Minneapolis on Saturday.
ICE far exceeds the second-placed reason for disapproval of Trump – 16 percent ranked the cost of living and inflation as their main choice.
The scale of the self-inflicted political wound is all the more staggering because Trump has already successfully fulfilled his key campaign promise to stop illegal immigration at the border.
It was a pledge that helped him sweep all seven swing states just 14 months ago.
Behind the scenes, officials have indicated he is angry that his success at the border has not been communicated properly to the public.
Instead, there has been a constant deluge of news reports about undocumented foreign nannies and gardeners being arrested by masked and heavily armed ICE operatives, culminating in the disaster that has now engulfed Minneapolis.
