One of these was expected, the other a wild upset in a district Trump carried by 17 points.
Earthquake in Texas Senate
“The heavily Latino parts of the district shifted sharply to the left from 2024”
Expect that to be a major theme in the midterm elections.
Texas Stunner
The Associated Press comments on the Texas Stunner.
Democrat Taylor Rehmet flipped a reliably Republican state Senate district in Texas in Saturday’s special election, continuing a string of surprise victories for Democrats across the U.S. in the year since President Donald Trump returned to the White House.
Rehmet, a labor union leader and veteran, easily defeated Republican Leigh Wambsganss, a conservative activist, in the Fort Worth-area district, which the Republican Trump had won by 17 points in 2024. With almost all votes counted, Rehmet was leading by more than 14 percentage points — a more than 30 point swing.
Rehmet’s victory added to Democrats’ record of overperforming in special elections so far this cycle, beginning in March — when they prevailed in a Pennsylvania legislative district made up of suburbanites and farmers that Democrats hadn’t held in a century — and continuing through to November, when they dominated candidate and ballot contests from Maine to California.
Democrats’ other state victories since 2025 included wins for governor in Virginia and New Jersey and in special elections in Kentucky and Iowa. And, while Republican Matt Van Epps won a Tennessee special election for a U.S. House seat, the relatively slim margin of victory gave Democrats hope for this fall’s midterms.
Gerrymander Challenge to Florida Governor
Special Election for US House Seat
Reuters reports Democrat Menefee Wins Texas Special Election for US House Seat.
Democrat Christian Menefee won a Texas special election for the U.S. House of Representatives on Saturday, the Associated Press reported, a result that will narrow Republicans’ already slender majority in the chamber.
Democrats Menefee, 37, a former Harris County attorney, and Amanda Edwards, 44, a former Houston city council member, were vying in a runoff to represent Texas’ 18th Congressional District, a solidly Democratic area encompassing much of the inner city of Houston and the surrounding region. [So this was expected].
In the U.S. House, Republicans hold a 218-213 majority. Democrats will insist upon a prompt swearing-in for Menefee, tightening the Republican lead to 218-214. Three House vacancies in Georgia, New Jersey and California are scheduled to be filled by special elections in March, April and August, respectively.
Last year, House Speaker Mike Johnson, a Louisiana Republican, enraged Democrats when he delayed the swearing-in of now-Representative Adelita Grijalva following a special election in Arizona. She won that contest in September but was not sworn in until mid-November.
Democrats have fared well in special elections since the beginning of last year, boosting the party’s hopes of winning control of the House in November’s midterm congressional elections, especially given Trump’s anemic popularity at the moment.
House Math
When Menefee is sworn in, the US House drops to 218-214. That means Johnson cannot afford to lose more than one Republican vote if Democrats unite against.
Minus two would be 216-216. Unlike the Senate where the Vice President breaks ties, there is no tiebreaker in the House.
Polymarket House and Senate
For those who don’t believe any polls (except those in alignment with their personal views) let’s discuss Polymarket Midterm Betting Odds.
Polymarket has an 82 percent chance of Democrats taking the House, and 36 percent on the Senate.
The former is my guess too, the latter perhaps a bit too high, but now easily possible.
Republicans rate to lose the House, and at least a seat in the Senate.
Words from Vance on Trump
Trump’s Immigration Approval Drops to Record Low -34 With Latinos
Please note Trump’s Immigration Approval Drops to Record Low -34 With Latinos
Only 39 percent approve Trump’s handling of immigration. That’s 39 percentage points too many.
But given MAGA support alone would be in that vicinity, the rest of the country has had enough.
Nearly half (49 percent) of non-MAGA GOP thinks ICE is too aggressive. I am increasingly confident Republicans will lose the House.
On January 18, 2026, I commented We Are Now Bearing the Poisoned Fruit of Trump’s Self-Proclaimed Morality
Trump says his own morality is the only check on his power.
Yes, that we can see.
Addendum: Anatomy of the Flip
That’s what I have been saying for months.
Trump Caught in Another Lie
VERYgood write up and analysis Mish.
Far-left wing liberal Mish should be having an orgasm over this news.
Left-wing – you’re having a laff!
Populist Trump supporters are the epitome of left wing: massive spending, massive deficits, government picking economic winners, tariffs to protect dying businesses, trouncing on the rights of the people, and corruption as far as the eye can see.
I hardly consider Mish to be left of very much.
Someone get their feelings hurt?
Only you.
Even a fool is thought wise if he keeps silent, and discerning if he holds his tongue.
you must be retarded. keep your helmet and mouthguard in. you think mish is a lefty ?
The DNC will find a way to mess this up as always.
It’s their role in this moronic puppet show. It wouldn’t surprise me if they were in a trans person for president next election.
Hillary with Joe as Veep
CLINTON / OBAMA TICKET
Californians fleeing the paradise they controlled. Old saying as California goes so does the nation.
As of early 2026, California continues to experience a significant population exodus, with residents primarily relocating to Texas, Arizona, and Nevada in search of lower housing costs and a better cost of living. Other top destination states include Florida, Oregon, Washington, Idaho, Tennessee, and North Carolina
I know/knew a lot of Hispanics fleeing LA the tipping point being avoiding ICE bullshit namely trashing the local economies going to rural areas in red states. Primarily Texas…in other times they would be Republican voters, they sure as hell are not now.
Dig into that Texas a little more. I believe I have seen some articles where people are bailing out of Texas now. While it looked attractive when everybody was arguing about masks and pretending that they were experts in germ theory, Texas looked great because you could do whatever you want. Doesn’t seem to be the case anymore.
up here in my hudson valley small city, lots of people relocated from TX the past few years. it’s weird. btw this town was the first capitol of NYS in 1776. the british marched up from NYC and burned it to the grown in 1777. glad i have a fire extinguisher handy.
that was using barack soros voting equipment, so who knows
Hello to the Tribe of No Evidence, we see you haven’t changed
What’s funny is hearing republicans continue to talk about “if we lose the House”. No if about it. They’re going to get creamed. In the Senate, Dems could flip ME, NC and IA – which would make it 50/50. Ohio is probably their best chance to take the Senate.
I will gain some respect for republicans if a fair midterm election is held. They can cry about rigging after the losses, and I’ll tolerate it. I won’t mock them, or be mean about it.
Heck, I might just readmit them to the category of “human being.”
When I’m wrong, I’m wrong, and I’d love to be proven wrong on this.
If I read this correctly you’re saying that you will consider respecting somebody for doing exactly what they are supposed to do and nothing more.
Sounds like we have a very low bar this year.
It’s been a rough decade. I need a win.
uh oh! I guess Texas is going to have to re-district again because the gerrymandering they did was to include more hispanic into republican (white) districts. I guess that’s not going to work out too well during the midterms.
And as a bonus California is going to add a ton of blue seats and get rid of red ones.
You reap what you sow idiots.
I can just hear the GodDAMMMIT! after that phone call ended.
The Veep has TDS…lol.
That was before he got on his knees and acquired a “taste” for the Donald.
Trump’s gestapo tactics are going to turn off a generation or more of formerly persuadable latino voters, one of the fastest growing demographics in the country. Brilliant strategy! Prop 187 turned California blue, Arizona’s prop 1070 turned Goldwater’s ruby red AZ into a swing state and still republicans can’t help themselves or learn any lessons.
You can’t fix this level of stupid. It’s only been 160+ years since the civil war and the racists keep thinking they’re going to win some day.
They’ve had the edge all those 160 years, to varying degrees. That still counts as winning according to their timeframes.
WRONG. every wealthy home owner in charleston SC that still owned their downtown mansions and houses……….and thousand acres of land on intracoastal or up the rivers…………..WERE DELIGHTED THEIR GREAT GRANDPAPPY WAS DUMB ENOUGH TO FIGHT AND HAPPY THEY LOST. like these old families understand, if not for that, SC would look like mexico. it was inevitable slavery would end anyway for a variety of reasons. from the progressives and abolitionists of the north to pure economics. the south couldn’t manufacture jack shit. in the mid 1800s. they were backward looking farmers with slaves.
Future documentaries written about the the heroic and patriotic fight to protect criminal aliens from Maga fascists, Trumps gestapo will be boring. Nothing like Schindler’s List, or Sicario.
Those were good films.
How will this drama get eyeballs. We’ll have to be an emotional tearjerker.
Needs snarling dogs, people thrown out of helicopters, buried alive for a starter. Something,but ringing bells whistles pushing and spitting, signs.
I’ll wait till it comes out on TV.
Would the rampant problems with pedophile rings and sex trafficking have any impact?
It appears to be a favorite past time of a lot of people, including ~27 members of the executive branch.
i lived in AZ when 1070 happened. i protested it at the capitol……..biggest crowd i’ve ever seen in USA protest. barcelona i saw 600,000 protesters
600k? Was that a Catalan independence protest?
I was asking this before and will ask again – what is a point of hiring someone when he not doing his job. Republicans has one job only this term, rein in Trump, They do opposite. All of them should be voted out, period
That’s because he is the king shit goblin, and they are all lesser shit goblins. it is in their nature.
That would require putting nation over self-aggrandizement. That’s just not who these people, or their voters, are.
Here’s a fun fact about the Constitution. You cannot impeach your Congress Critter. Impeachment of a Congress Critter can only be done by other Congress Critters.
I would like to be wrong but I can’t find anything to say otherwise.
Turns out there are quite a few bugs in the constitution… and no viable way to fix them. Meanwhile tech and culture are racing away from the world it was written for.
The whole party is deathly afraid of a near octogenarian Alzheimers patient. If you wrote fiction this dumb, they would burn the movie theater down and yell “Fire!” in celebration
now that is funny. i recently watched the planet of apes which came out a decade ago. bay area dystopia. i was rooting for the apes of course.
With that kind of brain on a body that powerful, they would eradicate us pretty quickly. We’d be remembered as ‘those bald, sickly apes’.
Did you see them scatter from that press conference when he made pudding in his pants? These people clearly know fear.
Just as I said earlier this week. In 2024 Hispanics dipped their vote in the red sauce. With the Storm Troopers prowling in the streets, methinks that the Hispanic rebound away from the GOP will be so extreme that it’ll probably be the end of the 30 year control of the executive and legislative by the GOP in Texas.
Lots of hispanics are Catholic and have been brainwashed to oppose abortion, with that issue out of the way now with SCOTUS ruling, there is no reason to vote republican in Texas.
Ruh roh….
Anecdotally I know a guy…
He’s from Cuba and thinks Trump is the cat’s meow. In case you didn’t know, people from Cuba tend to hate current Cuba and would love to see a regime change.
let them do it themselves. my kid went to college for a year in cuba. went to visit. crazy experience to be in a totalitarian marxist lenin state. no internet contact……….a decade ago we went. glad i did.
Smartest person I’ve ever known has said TX will be blue in the next election ever since (and including) 2016. Hurry up and wait?
who cares. in a few years we will have 50 state solution. nobody in NY or CA gives a fuck about TX. and vice versa. the way it should be. AZ is much better than TX. lived in AZ, CA, NY and SC………..all lovely places to call home.
Demographics tend to agree with you. Not sure if right at the next election, but the population in the red counties is in free fall. I do not gloat at it, for methinks that the Blues are a poor choice, but I shed no tears for the Reds.
The so-called opposition party has done nothing significant to oppose Trump.
So Democrats, who have done nothing, will be swept into office simply because people don’t like what Trump is doing.
It won’t make a difference. Voters never learn.
I disagree. Voters are having the UniParty destroy itself through rotation.
Trump destroyed Clinton and Bush legacy. Democrats now will come and destroy MAGA.
Hopefully, we get true Progressives and Libertarians in left and right going forward.
Well I do not want to see any progressives – That is what gave us Biden and Harris
I can’t keep track the labels, liberal, progressive, etc, but whatever AOC and Bernie are, is what I want more of from Democrats. That’s different than what gave us Biden and Harris. Biden and Harris were DNC creatures. Democrats these days know they are at risk of getting primaried from the left.
My definitions:
Looks like progressives or evil morons are what’s on the menu, unfortunately.
Interesting that you call Democrats progressives – from the perspective of we Europeans the Democrats are a pretty right-wing party, I don’t see any party in the US that I could regard as progressive.
Until Americans are not too scared of seeing a transgender person in their bathroom for fear of being raped or otherwise violated, I’ll stick with the argument that collectively Americans are far more regressive than their self-evaluation might suggest.
Sincerely,
A privileged white male American
I think progressives are necessary. Those are the people who were advocating to end slavery. I think they were also a big proponent of civil rights. Lately they got abit weird but the same can be said about the conservatives.
While both of these examples have proven bad for business and capitalism we have a responsibility to be civilized. I think a lot of that has been ignored over the last decades as the almighty dollar becomes more important than everything.
The progressives are trying to maintain our our civilization and humanity. If you got rid of them we would be living a feudal system.
One thing, the progressives do that’s different from the conservatives is they are more pro-consent. Which could also be pro-choice for some but it goes beyond that
biden and harris are NOT progressive or liberal. they are illiberal uniparty never ending war mongers. nobody could pass a blind test of who was in power the past 60 years. nobody. including YOU and ME
Personally i think the answers are in the middle. But with only two parties. If one side is for something the other has to be against it.
Unfortunately Mamdani/AOC/Bernie crowd of Democratic Socialists are rising fast. We need some sanity on the right to counter them. Perhaps a group that supports well regulated capitalism with real anti-trust and anti corruption goals that know how to balance a budget. We are not very capitalist today under Trump, more akin to Mussolini’s brand of oligarchy with crony capitalism
“Perhaps a group that supports well regulated capitalism with real anti-trust and anti corruption goals that know how to balance a budget”
If that were Republicans who also wanted to cut the DOD (DOW) to half or less, I’d vote for them and so would a lot of Democrats.
We need a third, and even a fourth, party to have meaningful change.
The Red and Blue teams spend all their time openly and very publicly disagreeing on a small minority of the issues, while every year voting to increase the defense/war budget and funding more and more weapons systems. It is truly a uniparty, and until we have a real opposition it will continue until it destroys us all.
Hmm. Perhaps, for Trump, tariffs have turned into torpedoes.
Damn them!
You don’t have to live like a Refugee
Hey, don’t do me like that
The best!
One more time to kill the pain?
“I want you, I need you, but there ain’t no way I’m EVER gonna love you. Now don’t be sad, cause two out of three ain’t bad.”
Did you know Meatloaf is wildly popular in the UK?
Mish, do you still do karaoke?!
Wrong album, right band. Even the losers get lucky sometimes.
Stop jamming him!
Well I won’t back down