cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/42505912
Democrat Taylor Rehmet won a special election for the Texas state Senate on Saturday, flipping a reliably Republican district that President Donald Trump won by 17 points in 2024.
This is enormous.
It’s a crazy swing
With almost all votes counted, Rehmet was leading by more than 14 percentage points — a more than 30-point difference.
I wish there were some way to determine how much of this incredible spread was due to actual resident preference versus those not bothering to show up because they believed the seat impossible to lose.
Republicans are incredibly unpopular with pretty much everyone that doesn’t own and wear maga gear. Apathy can’t really explain a 30 point swing.
Being a part of that group, I understand that. I guess I’m saying I’d just like to know if there’s a truly significant percentage of (now former) MAGAts who were flipped even in deep red country.
Usually when polling data is released they’ll have info about the political affiliation of voters. I don’t know about this election, but many of the special or off year elections since Trump have shown a mixture of lower republican turnout and a higher percentage of republican voters voting for democrats.
But for exact numbers you’d need to look into the elections. The Virginia state elections would probably be most telling as they do elections on odd years, so it wasn’t a special election and was for the whole state. Virginia is also a “purple” state and ended up flipping republican to Democrat majority.
How many more to turn Texas purple and then blue?
