Democrat Taylor Rehmet won a special election for a Texas state Senate seat on Saturday by a wide margin over his Republican opponent Leigh Wambsganss. Rehmet received 57 percent of the votes in the Fort Worth district, Wambsganss 43 percent. In the 2024 presidential election, Donald Trump won in the district with a lead of 17 percentage points.
Trump immediately distanced himself from Wambsganss and the lost local elections in Texas on Saturday. “I am not involved in those elections,” he told journalists at Mar-a-Lago, reports the Reuters news agency. “It’s a local Texan race.”
Earlier that day he campaigned for Wambsganss. “She is a highly successful entrepreneur and an incredible supporter of our Make America Great Again movement,” wrote Trump on his medium Truth Social. And: “My good friend Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick needs a strong, conservative Republican to keep Texas red!”
Deputy Governor Dan Patrick of Texas called the results of the local election on Saturday a “wake-up call”. On X he wrote that while low-turnout special elections are “always unpredictable,” the outcome proves that “our voters cannot take anything for granted.” There will be another election for this local Senate seat in November. That will go to the Republican party, Patrick writes. “We will keep Texas red.”
James Malone and Abigail Spanberger
Democrat Rehmet’s win follows a pair of surprising losses for Republican candidates, starting with James Malone in March 2025 – the Democrat won a Senate seat in a red district of Pennsylvania, where Trump won the election six months earlier by 15 percentage points.
Later, Democrat Abigail Spanberger won the governorship of the state of Virginia – a state where Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris won in 2024, but whose previous governor was a Republican.
American polling firms treasure that about 40 percent of the population thinks Trump is doing a good job as president. About 56 percent of Americans, according to those polls, disagree with the president’s policies. Whether that actually means that people are dissatisfied with the president is difficult to say. The percentage of voters who supported former Democratic President Joe Biden a year after his inauguration was down also around 40 percent.
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