A special election over the weekend has some conservatives worried about the outcome of November’s midterm elections, after a Democrat won a deep-red district in deep-red Texas.

Local union leader Taylor Rehmet on Saturday scored a 14-point victory over Republican candidate Leigh Wambsganss, executive director of Patriot Mobile’s political action committee, in a battle for a seat in the Texas State Senate, representing Senate District 9. The seat had been recently vacated by Republican Kelly Gene Hancock, who resigned from the Senate in June to take a position as chief clerk of the Texas Comptroller’s Office, becoming acting comptroller less than a month later when Comptroller Glenn Hegar became chancellor of the Texas A&M University System.

In November, a special election was set to elect Hancock’s successor. Rehmet won the largest share of the vote (47.57%), followed by Wambsganss (35.94%) and John Huffman (16.49%), another Republican. Since no candidate achieved a majority, however, Rehmet and Wambsganss advanced to a run-off election on January 31, which Rehmet won with 57.21% of the vote.

Both the November and January special elections were marked by low voter turnout. Previous elections in the district, which encompasses part of Tarrant County, including the cities of Keller, North Richland Hills, and Hurst, as well as most of Fort Worth, have seen anywhere from 244,000 voters (2018) to nearly 300,000 (2022) cast their ballots for the senate contest. In November, fewer than 120,000 voters showed up, and Saturday’s election drew an even smaller crowd of 94,880, representing only 16.45% of registered voters in the district.

Democratic National Committee (DNC) Chairman Ken Martin hailed Rehmet’s victory as a bellwether for the midterm elections in November. “Republicans just lost a district Trump won by 17 points — in Texas. That’s not an anomaly, it’s a pattern,” the DNC chief said in a social media post. (According to the Associated Press, President Donald Trump only won Tarrant County by five points in 2024.) Martin added, “Democrats are building on our historic overperformance, and we’re not slowing down. November is coming, and we’re ready. ALL GAS, NO BRAKES!!” Rep. Jasmine Crockett (R-Texas) also celebrated Rehmet’s win, pointing out that no Democrat has held that particular state senate seat in nearly 50 years.

Florida Governor Ron DeSantis (R), who has overseen even some of the deepest-blue districts in the Sunshine State flip red since taking office in 2019, warned his fellow conservatives not to presume that Trump’s sweeping victory in 2024 means the midterms will be easy too. The governor noted that special elections can be “quirky” and are not always an indicator of political trends but added that “a swing of this magnitude is not something that can be dismissed. Republicans should be clear-eyed about the political environment heading into the midterms.”

Other Republicans preferred to characterize the Democratic upset as a fluke. Rep. Pete Sessions (R-Texas) blamed the winter storm impacting much of the U.S. at present. “The success of a rain dance has a lot to do with timing,” Sessions said in a CNN interview addressing the low voter turnout. “And what happened is, there was a huge snowstorm — ice storm, really — that hit north Texas and central Texas.” However, the congressman also alleged that state Republicans made a “miscalculation” in running two competing GOP candidates. “What I will say,” he quipped, “is you should not lose any election in north Texas like this.”

Democrats enjoyed sweeping success in special elections last year, winning key state positions in Virginia, maintaining the New Jersey governorship, catapulting a foreign-born socialist to the New York City mayoralty, and winning numerous other low-profile races, with Republicans again fretting over what the Democratic victories could mean for the GOP’s already razor-thin majority in the U.S. House of Representatives come November.

As FRC Action Director Matt Carpenter told The Washington Stand, “This result is a good reminder that multiple things can be true at the same time. First, it is never good for a party to lose a seat they’ve safely held on to for decades, especially by a 14-point margin. There’s no way around it, that is a wake-up call for Republicans in Texas and nationwide. And second, special elections are less predictive than one would think. Special elections almost always produce the lowest turnout,” he warned, “they are always much shorter elections, and they also can draw significant outside investment that is not normally available in a regularly scheduled election.”

“With a shorter election,” Carpenter explained, “there is less time to define your opponent, and less time to find and mobilize voters. In this instance, the DNC dropped half a million dollars into the race, and that is not something they will be doing across the country on state senate races. There is concern among many that Texas is trending blue, we’ll have to wait and see if Rehmet can hang onto the seat in November, as he is set to face off against Wambsganss again in the 2026 general election.”