Lessons from the Lone Star State

A winning populist campaign with support for public education at its center

In case you missed it, Texas experienced a political earthquake this weekend as Democrats handily won a state legislative special election in a district that Trump carried by 17 points. I look at what just happened, why it matters, and why support for public education was so key to the Democrat’s long-shot win.

What just happened?

First: a quick recap. Democrat Taylor Rehmet, a veteran and union leader, absolutely trounced his opponent, conservative activist Leigh Wambsganss, becoming the first Democrat to win District 9 since 1991. And it wasn’t just the failure of GOP voters to show up, despite multiple eleventh-hour appeals from Trump himself, that sealed Wambsganss’ fate. According to pollster Ross Hunt, the self-described “ultra MAGA” candidate lost because she was rejected by independent voters along with plenty of Republicans. And while the GOP was quick to declare the results of the race meaningless–Rehmet and Wambsganss will face off again in November for a spot in the state senate, which won’t reconvene until 2027–the loss is just the latest in a string of defeats for the increasingly unhinged right in populous Tarrant County. As my fave columnist Bud Kennedy tartly observed, “[y]ou could say Saturday’s election made Trump and MAGA 0-1 in Texas. Or made the Tarrant County Republican Party 0-13.”

No surprise here

While the Democrat’s flip of this seat was treated as a ‘Texas stunner’ by much of the media, yours truly wasn’t all that surprised. For one thing, as I wrote about last year, Rehmet nearly won the race outright back in November, despite spending just $68K vs millions shelled out by his GOP opponents and their deep-pocketed PACS. For another, Rehmet ran as an economic populist and an ardent defender of public education–in other words, exactly the sort of candidate that Democrats need if they are to succeed at, well, anything. And that support of public education was absolutely key here as the GOP’s education extremism alienates growing swathes of the electorate. Let’s break it down, shall we?

Backlash to the backlash

The name Leigh Wambsganss may be unfamiliar (and unpronounceable) to you, but I’m betting that you’re well acquainted with her employer: Patriot Mobile. That would be the right-wing Christian wireless provider that orchestrated takeovers of various Texas school boards, stacking them with Christian nationalists and MAGA faithful. (For more on this, check out Mike Hixenbaugh’s terrific book They Came for the Schools). Those efforts proved remarkably successful, that is until local parents got a close-up view of the activists’ book-banning, culture warring agenda. Then came the attempt last year to split the Keller district into two, cleaving the wealthier city of Keller from its larger, lower-class suburban bits. The backroom maneuver, which Wambsganss helped engineer, backfired spectacularly, alienating local parents, along with voters who typically ignore school board politics.

Vouchers are (still) roiling Texas

There is a fitting irony to the timing of Rehmet’s victory, which came at the tail end of the annual privatization lovefest known as School Choice Week. As I’ve been writing here and elsewhere, school vouchers remain deeply unpopular in Texas, not just among public school supporters but among grassroots conservatives. If you still don’t believe me, consider that Wambsganss herself was among the conservative activists who opposed Greg Abbott’s voucher plan, a position she was forced to “forget” in order to activate the big money spigot which funded her campaign. While Wambsganss was tied up in knots trying to explain where she stood on public education, Rehmet’s position couldn’t have been clearer: “He supports fully funding public schools and ending voucher schemes that drain them.” When the editor of the Current Revolt, a conservative news outlet, surveyed attendees at Wambsganss’ election night party about why they thought she’d lost, they specifically mentioned her flip flop on vouchers. In other words, had she run as a voucher opponent, she’d likely have done better.

Partisan revolt

When voters gave the heave ho to culture warring school board candidates last year, they signalled their exhaustion with the politicization of public education. Rehmet tapped into that frustration to great effect. I’m going to quote again from his campaign website because the language is refreshingly clear: “Taylor will stand with teachers, parents, and students to invest in neighborhood schools, protect public education from privatization, and keep extremist politics and religious ideology out of the classroom.” And voters responded to this vision vs. the increasingly unhinged rhetoric of Steve Bannon, who set up a Texas wing of his War Room podcast in order to boost Wambsganss’ candidacy. (As my beloved stated after tuning into a recent episode, “I can’t #$%@ believe that Bannon is trying to get everybody worked up about Sharia law.”)

Wake up, Dems

Rehmet’s win also comes at a time when national Democrats and their pundit pals are trying to reclaim the mantle of ‘school fixers.’ Recent weeks have brought us a deluge of fawning stories about Rahm Emanuel, including the comically titled “Rahm Emanuel has a plan to fix schools and the Democratic Party. Will it work?” I can answer that! If you’ve forced yourself to consume pablum like this, this or this, then you know that Emanuel’s recipe for his party’s success is to embrace the kinds of education reforms–standardized testing, cutting funds to schools where kids don’t show up–that thrill party elites, donors and influencers, while leaving parents and voters cold. (Ironically, the recent state takeover of the Fort Worth ISD, justified by rhetoric that could have come from a Rahm press release, appears to have been another factor in Rehmet’s win.) Notably, Rehmet ran as an education candidate, but not of the Rahm variety. Instead, he made the case that support for public education is central to a populist economic agenda, one in which workers earn more because they have more power.

So what happens next?

Back in 2019 I traveled to Texas and spent a week motoring around the multi-laned spaghetti junction known as the Metroplex. I was at work on a podcast about how the GOP’s sharp turn against public education had triggered a backlash, particularly among suburban voters, that was upending state politics. Alas, as is so often the case, I was right too soon. And yet the rejection of culture war candidates and the ongoing backlash to school vouchers convinces me that my initial sense was correct. Meanwhile, the hostility to public education that has proved such a turn off to voters in Texas is now party policy in virtually every red state. When Florida Governor Ron DeSantis weighed in on Rehmet’s win, warning 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,” I wondered if he was talking about his home state. Perhaps even more than Texas, Florida has become a testing ground for just how far GOP pols can go towards kneecapping their public schools before they start paying a price among suburban voters.

The opposite of populism

This week also marked the official rollout of the federal voucher program, a $5 billion dollar tax credit smuggled into Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill. As I argued last year, the sneaky maneuver not only circumvents the will of Trump’s own voters but enriches the very wealthy and decimates public budgets in the process. That vouchers are among the most glaring examples of just how ‘faux’ is the GOP’s brand of populism is obvious. And yet that contradiction seems lost on many Democrats who are all too eager to jump on the voucher bandwagon.

It was a Texas teacher who opened my eyes to the anger over vouchers on the populist right. Brett Guillory, who taught welding in Houston, caught my attention when he proclaimed on Twitter that “vouchers aren’t MAGA. Not even close.” I ended up interviewing him for a podcast episode about conservative opposition to vouchers, a conversation that evolved into a genuine friendship. Brett saw vouchers as classic Robin Hood in reverse, redistributing wealth from the working and middle class to the wealthy. I learned an incredible amount from Brett, who passed away from cancer last month. While he’d started out as a fierce Trump fan, he grew increasingly critical of the president in the last year of his life. As he liked to say “Trump is a fraud and vouchers are the proof.” And yet Brett had a fundamentally optimistic view of where our politics are headed. During one of our last conversations he told me that a political earthquake was coming.

Corporations and politicians are working together for the elite in order to get around the Constitution. And I think those corporations are so powerful, so money, the super PACs, they own our reps. Our reps do not listen to us. They do whatever these large corporations, these super PACs, and the wealthy elites want them to do, like Tim Dunn and Farris Wilkes out in West Texas. They control the Texas Republican Party. I think the political landscape over the next four years, I believe, is going to change drastically. I really do believe that because I think more and more people are waking up to our enemy is: the billionaires that are controlling everything.

Taylor Rehmet’s victory this weekend shows us that Brett was onto something.