This past Saturday, an under-the-radar special election for a Texas state Senate seat rocked the political world. The Democratic candidate, Taylor Rehmet, won by 14 percentage points in a district that went for President Donald Trump by 17 points in 2024.

Republicans immediately tried to spin the result, arguing that low turnout made it meaningless. That argument collapses under even minimal scrutiny. More than half of the electorate that showed up was Republican.

This formatting makes the results even more striking:

Voter partisanship:

• Republican: 51%
• Democrat: 35%

Results:

• Republican: 43%
• Democrat: 57%

The results are extra amazing given that Republicans spent over $2.4 million on the race, while Democrats spent less than $250,000.

Number crunchers are still parsing the data, and it’s wondrous to behold. Particularly noteworthy is the unmistakable fury of the Latino electorate, which foolishly swung hard toward Trump in 2024, giving him 48% of their vote despite the president’s history of bigotry and disrespect toward them.

That support has collapsed.

In this special election, Latino voters backed the Democratic candidate by an astonishing margin, 85% to 15%, according to VoteHub. This is the political cost of an administration that has chosen xenophobia and cruelty as governing tools, unleashing a campaign of intimidation and violence against immigrant communities and assuming those voters would tolerate it.

This pattern should look familiar. After Democrats stunned observers by flipping the Miami mayoral race this past December—winning it for the first time in nearly 30 years—the common thread was an enraged Latino electorate. At the time, polling suggested Latino voters were moving sharply away from the GOP, but Miami proved it.

"When Cubans in Miami are shifting the same direction as Puerto Ricans and Dominicans in NYC, something significant is happening,” tweeted Latino GOP consultant Mike Madrid after the Miami results.

You can now add Mexicans in Texas to that list.

After Democrats’ strong off-year results in November, election analyst Nate Gonzales examined whether Democrats could overcome Texas’ aggressive GOP gerrymander, which was designed to net Republicans five additional seats. Using what he described as Democrats’ “best-case scenario” based on historical voting patterns, he concluded that the party “would be able to hold three of the seats Republicans targeted with the new map, and flip two other putatively GOP seats—but they would still lose two currently Democratic-held seats (the 9th and 32nd), so the net result would be no gains for either side.” He floated a single net pickup for Democrats as a theoretical possibility but described it as “slim.”

Even a net-zero outcome in Texas would be a win since Democrats are all but guaranteed five new seats in California. That alone would represent a staggering miscalculation by Trump, who launched a redistricting war assuming Democrats would simply absorb the damage.

But Gonzales’ “best case for Democrats” analysis hinged on the idea of Latino voters reverting the level of support they showed Democrat Hillary Clinton in 2016, when she won 66% of the Latino vote.

This election blew past that.

When 85% of Latinos are voting Democratic, and when even some Republican voters are crossing over, the math changes fast. Suddenly, nothing is off the table this November—not just House seats but also statewide races as well, including the governorship and the Senate.

What happened in Texas on Saturday wasn’t a fluke. It was a warning. And the more data that comes in, the clearer it gets: Republicans are in real trouble, and they did it to themselves.

Markos Moulitsas is founder and editor of the blogging website Daily Kos and author of three books.

Reprinted with permission from Daily Kos