Leigh Wambsganss, the Republican candidate for a Fort Worth-area state Senate seat, no longer labels herself “ULTRA MAGA” on social media.
Wambsganss also removed a large “Trump Endorsed” banner from her campaign website and in August replaced a photo of herself and President Donald Trump with a photo of her family.
Her yard signs no longer proclaim Trump’s endorsement or mention her party affiliation. Instead, the now-blue signs sport a new slogan: “Putting working families first.”
Wambsganss is running against Taylor Rehmet, a Democrat who defeated her in a January special election runoff for the same Senate seat — a 14.5-point victory that alarmed Republicans and invigorated Democratic hopes for a previously safe Republican district that Trump won by 17.4 points in 2024.
Wambsganss said she adapted her campaign to focus on what voters care about and to emphasize her experience as a working mom who held three jobs in college.
“I’m still endorsed by the president. I am proud of all of my endorsements, but we’re going to a November election and we have to appeal to a larger audience,” she said in an interview. “The messaging has changed because some new issues have come up.”
Wambsganss praised Gov. Greg Abbott’s moratorium on data centers and said lowering property taxes is voters’ number one issue and her priority. She said she supports increasing the homestead tax exemption, eliminating property taxes tied to school district maintenance and operation expenses and promoting stronger municipal control over taxes.
“I don’t believe Austin should be Big Brother — mandating and telling cities what they can do with their municipal taxing entities,” Wambsganss said. “Austin doesn’t know about local communities and what the local citizens want.”
Rehmet, an Air Force veteran, mechanist and union leader, has dedicated his campaign to affordability, particularly on healthcare costs and property taxes. He said working midnight shifts and having to choose between seeing a doctor and paying bills gives him experience with affordability issues.
“I’ve been talking about affordability since day one and that has not changed. In fact, things have gotten much worse than whenever we had this election back earlier this year,” Rehmet said in an interview.
He also wants to lower property tax rates for homeowners and commit more state funding to schools.
“It’s never been more expensive to educate kids in this great state, but we haven’t even kept up with inflation when it comes to funding for the past 10 years, and it’s only gotten worse since COVID,” Rehmet said.
The District 9 state Senate race leapt into the Texas political spotlight after Rehmet, then a first-time candidate, came within 3,000 votes of outright winning a November 2025 special election against Wambsganss and John Huffman, the former Republican mayor of Southlake. At stake was a Senate seat held for 12 years by Republican Kelly Hancock, who resigned in June 2025 to become the acting Texas comptroller.
The Wambsganss campaign spent around $1 million before the January runoff that Rehmet won with a solid 57% of the vote, sending him to the Senate for the roughly 11 months left on Hancock’s term. About 15% of registered voters cast a ballot — high for a special election runoff, where single-digit turnout is the norm.
Wambsganss called the energy of Democrats a “wakeup call” for Republicans. She also argued the “dynamics of a special election are fundamentally different” than they would be in November, when a four-year term is on the line.
Matt Angle, a Democratic strategist, said Rehmet’s surprise victory reflected division among Tarrant County Republicans and increased resources and mobilization from Democrats.
“If you look at it on paper or if you’d have looked at it four years ago, Democrats have no business winning,” Angle said.
Senate District 9’s Latino community played a large role in Rehmet’s upset win as precincts with a majority of Hispanic residents swung on average 34 percentage points toward Rehmet compared to the Democratic vote in the 2022 election, when the seat was last on the ballot. The swing elated Democrats after Trump made major gains with Latino voters in 2024, when exit polls showed him capturing 55% of the state’s Latino vote.
Neither candidate had a primary opponent in March, allowing Wambsganss and Rehmet to turn their attention toward the November rematch, anticipating much higher turnout.
Wambsganss’s shift in messaging is to be expected heading into the November general election, Republican strategists say.
“Every Democratic campaign, from state rep to the United States Senate, is running against Donald Trump,” said Vinny Minchillo, a Plano-based GOP strategist. “So in your local race you have to decide the value of a Trump adjacency and how much Trump messaging you have.”
Ross Hunt, a Republican strategist in Dallas, said the Wambsganss campaign will need to build bridges beyond the Republican base — which turned out for her in the January runoff — to broaden her appeal for the general election.
Minchillo agreed, saying it’s important for Wambsganss to win over moderate Republicans who may be skeptical of Attorney General Ken Paxton, the Republican candidate for U.S. Senate who faces questions about his electability at the top of the ballot.
“Ken Paxton has weak spots so … it’s a dangerous place to be down-ballot,” Minchillo said. “Normally you would expect the top of the ticket to pull you along. Well, there’re holes in the turnout for the top of the ticket, so you gotta pick it up and make that happen for yourself.”
Angle called Wambsganss’s shift away from Trump, who carries high unfavorability ratings in polls, disingenuous. A late September poll of likely Texas voters by Fox News found 55% disapproved of Trump’s performance, while 44% approved.
“Every campaign adjusts for the general election,” Angle said. “But it’s another thing to completely drop your identification and completely abandon what your entire history is. … To pretend that somehow that history doesn’t exist is just dishonest.”
Wambsganss rose to prominence in Tarrant County in 2022 when she helped Republicans fill four North Texas school boards with Christian conservatives. She is the chief communications officer of Patriot Mobile, a cell phone company whose political action committee, led by Wambsganss, poured hundreds of thousands of dollars into school board races in Tarrant County.
She was endorsed by Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, the Senate’s powerful presiding officer, the same day she entered the race. Patrick later loaned her campaign $150,000. She was also endorsed by Trump, U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz and many local Republicans.
Wambsganss also received campaign contributions from prominent conservative organizations, including $500,000 from Texans for Lawsuit Reform, a tort reform group, and $350,000 from Texans United for a Conservative Majority, a group primarily funded by oil businessman Tim Dunn, between July and September.
Wambsganss raised $1.2 million in the period, dwarfing Rehmet’s haul of $192,247.
Huffman,who has endorsed neither candidate but said he was impressed with Rehmet’s community engagement, predicted voters will see through Wambsganss’ change in messaging.
“A candidate doesn’t do something like pull Trump messaging off of signs and a website without full knowledge of the implication that people will see it and draw conclusions from it,” Huffman said. “You don’t do it because the president is so popular, right?”
Angle said Rehmet needs to keep his messaging consistent to win over Tarrant County voters who might have defaulted to Republican candidates but are now looking toward the middle.
“Taylor needs to keep doing what he’s been doing — serve the district and make it clear that he cares about people having good schools” while pointing out that Wambsganss “led the effort to have the national right-wing forces take over the local public schools.”
When Wambsganss entered the race in June 2025, Rehmet called her “a white supremacist in pearls” and “a conspiracy-peddling extremist” in posts on X. With the election weeks away, however, Rehmet said he rarely mentions Wambsganss because focusing on his opponent or culture war issues would detract from his concentration on affordability.
“I just want to run for this district, not against anyone,” Rehmet said. “I don’t want any distractions … and the culture war is a distraction from focusing on why people can’t afford their cancer treatment, a roof over their head or being able to afford food for their family.”
Wambsganss also said she rarely mentions her opponent on the campaign trail unless voters ask about him.
Rehmet, she tells them, presents “far left” policy ideas such as rent control. His campaign website in 2025 called for statewide rent stabilization, but the issue is no longer mentioned.
“He presents himself as a moderate, which is what all of the Democrats are doing right now. Nothing is further from the truth,” Wambsganss said. “He is no moderate. He’s a radical Democrat that supports policies that would raise taxes.”
This article first appeared on The Texas Tribune.
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