Taylor Rehmet Wins Texas State Senate Seat in Trump District

Conservative activist Leigh Wambsganss spent the last five years building a reputation as a force to be reckoned with when it came to Texas schools. In 2021, the former news anchor and  Miss Oklahoma runner-up launched a campaign to oust her local school board over a proposal to address racism in the majority-white school district. (The plan, which included a “diversity council” to help make the school more inclusive, was created after a viral video captured white students shouting the n-word at a party.) 

Wambsganss raised hundreds of thousands of dollars in support of a slate of school board candidates who replaced the sitting board in its entirety and blocked the DEI plan. She was hired by Patriot Mobile Action, the Christian cell phone company’s political action committee, the following year as the PAC sought to replicate her success, recruiting and bankrolling the candidacies of far-right school board members across the state of Texas. 

Steve Bannon was among those who hailed the model as one Republicans nationwide should be following. But that might have been poor advice.

On Saturday, Wambsganss lost her second race in a row to Democrat Taylor Rehmet for a state Senate seat in deep-red Tarrant County, Texas. The runoff took place after Rehmet won a three-way match-up last November. This is a district that Donald Trump won by 17 points in 2024; this weekend, Rehmet — who will be the first Democrat to represent the district in 35 years — won it by 14. And he won running on a platform that placed the funding of public education at its very center.

“Right now public education is really under attack,” Rehmet told Rolling Stone two days after his upset victory. He focused his campaign on issues that local parents told him they cared about: the Texas Education Agency’s takeover of Fort Worth‘s school district, and a school voucher “scam” that diverts funding from public schools to charter schools. 

“We have to stay local, and we have to stay out of the campaigns of outrage — we don’t need to politicalize the schools,” Rehmet said. “School races are non-partisan. They need to stay that way. … We need to just make sure that we focus on what the community needs. And schools right now? They need help.” 

Rehmet is not a parent himself — unless you count his “baby boy,” a french bulldog named Samson. The 33-year-old grew up the only child of an airplane mechanic and a beautician in Garland, Texas, before enlisting in the Air Force, where he spent four years stationed in North Dakota, “turning wrenches on B-52 bombers.” He returned to Texas, where he eventually got a job as a machinist for Lockheed Martin. He joined the union, and later rose to be president of the local and state chapter of that union, the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers. 

Running those races for union leadership, he said, was not all that different from the Senate race. “People who are frustrated and angry? They always vote,” Rehmet said. “Whether it be a union election or a state-level election or an election just like this one in Texas district nine. People use their vote as their voice.”

Republicans are feeling that anger. After losing the initial race in November, the party worked hard to boost Wambsganss’ candidacy ahead of the run-off. Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick urged Republicans to “please, please, please, please” turn out in a radio appearance last week, and Trump issued a similar plea on Truth Social, imploring his Texas supporters, “PLEASE MAKE A PLAN TO GET OUT AND VOTE FOR LEIGH WAMBSGANSS IN THE JANUARY 31ST SPECIAL RUNOFF ELECTION!” (Trump distanced himself from Wambsganss while speaking to reporters after her loss on Sunday. “I’m not involved in that. That’s a local Texas race,” Trump said.)

That support was not lip-service either: Wambsganss’ outraised and outspent Rehmet nearly 10 to one — her campaign reported spending $2.4 million dollars between July and January, compared to the $242,173 spent by Rehmet’s campaign.

His upset may have been a surprise nationally, but it was not internally. 

“My scrappy team — it was all local folks, I didn’t get any outside consultants, nothing like that — we had our numbers, we felt good about them,” Rehmet said. “You can’t always accurately measure it, but you feel it every time you go to a door, every time you have a phone conversation with an undecided voter, and that gave me the confidence that I had the trust of the community.”

Rehmet’s victory continues a nationwide winning streak for Democrats at the state legislature level: the party flipped 25 Republican-held seats in 2025, while Republicans failed to win a single seat held by a Democrat. The party broke a supermajority in Mississippi, won a supermajority in the New Jersey Assembly, won a Democratic trifecta in Virginia, and hung on its one-seat majority in the Minnesota Senate. Democrats appear determined to compete in Texas this year: For the first time ever this year, the party is running candidates on every single ballot line at the state and federal level. 

Rehmet will serve out the remainder of Republican Kelly Hancock’s term, which is set to end in January, but it’s unlikely he’ll have the chance to vote on or introduce legislation — the legislature is out of session for the rest of the year. An election, to be held in November, will decide who is sworn in when the new session begins in January 2027. (Both Rehmet and Wambsganss are running in that race as well.)

It will undoubtedly be a higher turn-out race, but Rehmet feels good about his chances. “I won in November and I won the other day,” Rehmet told Rolling Stone. “I would say what I’m doing is working, and I know it’s working because it’s what I would want to see from a politician whenever I was on the shop floor, working, turning wrenches.”