Same Song, Different State: Democrat Wins in Louisiana District Trump Carred Thrice
Capitol Inside
February 8, 2026
Texas Republicans received their second wake-up call in a seven-day span when a Democrat won a special state House election in Louisiana by two dozen points on Saturday in a district that President Donald Trump won by 13 in 2024.
At a time when GOP partisans are portraying Taylor Rehmet's blowout win in the special Senate District 9 runoff in Tarrant County as an isolated incident, Democrat Chasity Verret Martinez shot a hole through that theory when she she crushed a Republican with 62 percent of the vote in the special election in the Pelican State.
Louisiana Republicans expected to flip the 60th Representative District that's located south of the Baton Rouge area after GOP Governor Jeff Landry appointed the Democrat who'd been the incumbent there to a job as a job as a state alcohol and tobacco commissioner. But Martinez, a former council member in Iberville Parish, followed Rehmet's lead in the Lone Star State when she claimed 62 percent of the vote against Republican Brad Daigle in the special election in Louisiana.
Rehmet's win in the special SD 9 competition last weekend may have been more significant in the sense that Democrats picked up a seat in a Texas district that Republicans had controlled since 1983. Rehmet defeated Republican Leigh Wambsganss by more than 14 points in overtime in the Tarrant House district where Trump beat Democrat Kamala Harris a little over a year ago by 17.
The similarities that the District 60 vote and the special Tarrant runoff share will fuel and exacerbate the fear and anxiety that Rehmet commanding victory triggered among Republicans who thought Wambsganss would prevail in OT in SD 9 a week ago. But the Martinez margin of victory in the neighboring red state may be more alarming to some Republicans in light of a 37-point swing in District 60 compared to a swing of 31 points in the special runoff election in SD 9.
The Louisiana seat is the eighth that Democrats have flipped in legislative races around the country during Trump's second term according to CBS News. That's eight more than the Republicans have converted to their side of the ledger in the same span of time.
Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick, who handpicked Wambsganss for the SD 9 race and bankrolled her campaign, blamed a low turnout among GOP voters for the upset there last weekend. Wambsganss, who will square off with Rehmet for the third time in the November general election, repeated Patrick's assertion. But Capitol Inside reported last week that the SD 9 race featured the highest turnout for a special Senate runoff in 25 years if not longer in Texas.
Prominent Texas GOP pollster Ross Hunt told CBS Texas on Saturday that 25 percent to 33 percent of the Republican voters voted for Rehmet in the special SD 9 runoff along with 55 percent to 75 percent in the initial election in November based on his research. "And that is the big warning sign for Republican candidate for this fall," Hunt said.
Hunt said the electorate in SD 9 was 52 percent Republican and 36 percent Democrat going into the special SD 9 vote. "And yet the democrat is winning 57-43," the consultant added. "So you do the math."
Hunt's post-mortem analysis of the special SD 9 overtime election found that Wambsganss garnered 8,455 fewer votes from Republicans in Fort Worth than she and Republican John Huffman had received between the two of them in the opening vote last fall when Rehmet was the only Democrat on the ballot there. Wambsganss had 6,956 votes in the runoff in her home base of Southlake and Keller - a pair of affluent suburbs contained in SD 9 - than the combined count for the two Republicans in the initial election.
Huffman, who was eliminated with a third-place finsh in round one, has added insult to injury by saying that Wambsganss failed to reach out to any of 19,000 voters who backed him in November.
more to come ...
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