For voters in north Fort Worth and Tarrant County, the next election is now | Opinion
AI-generated summary reviewed by our newsroom.
- District 9 voters face four campaigns in 14 months to fill Texas Senate seat.
- Republicans Huffman and Wambsganss prioritize conservative platform in race.
- Low turnout expected Nov. 4 despite high stakes for Fort Worth representation.
The longest election is here, and the question is whether Fort Worth and north Tarrant County will vote.
There’s only one partisan race on the ballot Nov. 4. Two Southlake Republicans and a Fort Worth Democrat are running side by side to fill a local seat in the all-powerful Texas Senate.
It doesn’t end there. Unless one candidate slam-dunks more than 50% of the vote, the top two will meet in a runoff early in 2026 on a date yet to be set.
Yes, even if they’re from the same party.
Win or lose, by then Southlake Republicans John Huffman and Leigh Wambsganss will probably have filed to run again March 3 in the regular party primary.
The primary winner would meet a Democrat — maybe a rematch against current Democratic candidate Taylor Rehmet — in the next general election Nov. 3, 2026.
If you’re counting, that’s four campaigns in just over a year.
Extra elections in Fort Worth and Tarrant County
There is no question voters will turn out in 2026 to vote in a combustible U.S. Senate race for Sen. John Cornyn’s seat.
The question is whether voters will turn out this Nov. 4 and Dec. 13 to choose a local Texas senator to represent District 9 and Tarrant County until Jan. 1, 2027.
This weird Groundhog Day election is the result of Westlake Republican Kelly Hancock’s promotion to acting Texas comptroller, the state’s accountant.
The District 9 map includes almost everybody across north and west Fort Worth and north Tarrant County, stretching from Benbrook to Bedford and Southlake. It also includes the Near Southside of Fort Worth and downtown Arlington.
Make no mistake: This is the only Fort Worth or Tarrant County Senate seat. Four other districts lap over into the county. But those senators live somewhere else.
So, voting is important for downtown Fort Worth and Arlington, for Lockheed Martin, for Alliance Airport, for UT Arlington, for 11 public school districts like Keller and Birdville and for the Dallas Cowboys and Texas Rangers.
In short, this is not an election to sit out.
Former Fort Worth mayor worries about turnout
“I’m worried the turnout will be very low — I am,” former Fort Worth Mayor Betsy Price said Wednesday after interviewing Huffman and Wambsganss for a Republican club forum.
The last time this Senate seat was on the ballot, it was 2022 and Gov. Greg Abbott led the ticket. The voter turnout was 47%.
But in an off-year odds-and-ends election, the turnout is typically about 8%.
“It worries me,” Price said.
Then she explained why.
“The Senate is the smaller body [31 members],” she said. “They tend to set the tone. ... And they serve a four-year term, so you’ve got to get this right. This person will represent a big swath of Fort Worth and Northeast Tarrant County.”
John Huffman, Leigh Wambsganss follow GOP party lines
The two Republicans are easily to define.
Huffman is a former Southlake mayor and a businessman and lawyer who grew up in a family of doctors. As mayor, he worked on typical city issues such as trimming taxes and improving public safety.
Wambsganss was a real estate agent and is married to a past Southlake mayor. She is a ferocious church and social-issues Republican activist who flipped school boards as leader of the Patriot Mobile phone reseller’s outside political effort.
At another forum Aug. 28 in Hurst, they dwelled on Republican red-meat issues such as local-option casino gambling and who did more to end affirmative action for women and minorities. (The alphabet-soup code now is “CRT” and “DEI.”)
But for about 60 onlookers at the Cowtown Republican Women meeting at River Crest Country Club, Price mostly kept the talk to business and leadership.
“You don’t have to wonder how I’m going to act in Austin, because you can look at what I did in office,” Huffman said.
Huffman, Wambsganss against the ‘woke mob’
“I cut property taxes to historic levels. ... I stood against the national media and against the woke mob when they came for our city,” he said, referring to NBC’s “Southlake” podcast and national news coverage of school leaders’ dismantling anti-discrimination policies.
In a subtle appeal to independent voters that he will need in a December runoff, Huffman said his leadership style is to reach for a coalition even if it includes “folks that vote for different presidents.”
Running in a district that was about 55% Republican in 2024, Wambsganss delivered a purely GOP message about her party leadership as a state convention delegate and helping write the state party platform.
“I am a Christian constitutional conservative,” she said in her introduction, adding: “Politics is not political. To me, politics is more of a spiritual calling.”
In Southlake, she said, “we started a trend across the country fighting critical race theory and DEI. ... I trained hundreds and thousands of people across the country how to take their school district back.”
She rallied the partisan crowd in her closing.
“I have fought for many, many years to keep Tarrant red,” she said. “It is a battle royale. The left is coming after our state and especially after Tarrant County.”
Since Rehmet, the Fort Worth Democrat, wasn’t involved in this GOP event, I don’t know much about him.
But I do know he’s a union leader at Lockheed Martin. And I know that thanks to both Taylor Swift and Taylor Sheridan of “Yellowstone,” this is a very good time to be named “Taylor.”
The Nov. 4 election is only a semifinal. The final round will be Dec. 13.
Whether you support one of the Republicans or the Democrat, this is your only chance this year to vote.
This story was originally published September 4, 2025 at 10:59 AM.
