How Important Is Tarrant County In The 2026 Election?
The good old boys are almost out of road.
This is the third installment of this series, where we’re looking at election data from the largest counties to see where we need to be for our hypothetical big blue wave in November. If you missed our previous installments:
Harris and Dallas, the only counties with higher populations than Tarrant, are reliably blue and need to focus on turnout. Tarrant, on the other hand, is where the battleground is. It’s a swing county because Republicans have held the reins of county government for too long. 2026 could be the year that changes.
Twenty years ago, Tarrant County was over 75% white and the largest red county in America.
And of course, we know that Demographics are not destiny, but we can see in Tarrant County that votes have been trending blue for a long time.
More than that, there’s a heavy burden on Tarrant County, just like Harris and Dallas. In 2024, 7.96% of all Texas Democrats lived in Tarrant County. And in a state as big as Texas, that’s a lot of weight to pull.
The good old boys are still hanging on.
Because here’s the thing about Tarrant County. This isn’t a story about demographics slowly working their magic while everybody waits around for the numbers to catch up. This is a county government that knows exactly what’s coming and is doing everything in its power to make sure it never arrives. They’ve gerrymandered maps. The Tarrant County jail that can’t stop killing people. The County Judge told the only Black woman on the Commissioners Court to shut up. This is what a dying regime looks like when it still has its hands on the levers.
Start with Tim O’Hare, the County Judge. Before Tarrant, O’Hare was mayor of Farmers Branch, where he made it his life’s work to run Latino residents out of town, an obsession that ended up costing that city millions in legal fees. He brought the same energy to Fort Worth. He’s taken money from the Defend Texas Liberty PAC, an organization with documented Nazi ties, and he has never denounced it, not once, not even when asked directly. He led the charge to defund Girls Inc. of Tarrant County, a program that serves Black and Hispanic girls. And in April of 2025, in front of the entire Commissioners Court, he told Commissioner Alisa Simmons, a Black woman, to “sit down and be quiet,” then accused her of lacking “a semblance of class.” Read that however you want.
He’s not doing this alone. Tony Tinderholt, the just-retired state rep, announced he was running for Simmons’ own Precinct 2 seat the day after the county’s gerrymandered map passed. Tinderholt is also one of the Texas House’s top recipients of Defend Texas Liberty PAC cash, and he was one of the few Republicans in the state to vote against the CROWN Act, a bill that simply says you can’t fire someone for their hairstyle. Matt Krause, another commissioner, used to represent a State House district that federal courts had once found to have been racially gerrymandered. This is the bench.
And then there’s the jail. Sheriff Bill Waybourn has been in office since 2017, and in that time, more than 70 people have died in his custody. Anthony Johnson Jr. died of asphyxiation after a jailer knelt on his back for over a minute while he said he couldn’t breathe. Two former jailers are now indicted for murder. The county has paid out more than $4.3 million settling lawsuits over deaths and abuse in that jail. When Commissioner Simmons has tried to get Waybourn to brief the court on what’s happening inside, she’s refused, calling her requests “hostile.” Waybourne has also spoken at a Turning Point USA event, an organization with its own well-documented ties to white supremacist rhetoric.
And the redistricting, the whole reason Tinderholt is running for Simmons’ seat in the first place, is because the Commissioners Court redrew Precincts 1 and 2, the only Democratic-held seats, and O’Hare admitted on camera it was to lock in a Republican majority. Simmons and her fellow Democratic commissioner had the UCLA Voting Rights Project analyze the new maps, and the conclusion was that every proposed map packed Black and Hispanic voters into a single district to dilute their power everywhere else. Lawsuits were filed. They got dismissed on procedural grounds. The map stands for 2026.
But something has shifted in Tarrant County. Democrats have been sweeping local races, and Taylor Rhemet’s win was the cherry on top.
Last year, Democrats flipped multiple school boards in Tarrant County. This year, they flipped several city council races across the county. And on January 31, Democrat Taylor Rehmet beat Republican Leigh Wambsganss for a state Senate seat that hadn’t gone blue since 1991. Not close, either. 57% to 43%, in a district Trump carried by 17 points just over a year earlier. Wambsganss outspent him by two million dollars. She’s the chief communications officer for Patriot Mobile, the outfit that’s spent the last several years funding the Christian nationalist school board takeovers.
Hispanic voters did that. In some of the heavily Latino precincts on Fort Worth’s north side, Rehmet outperformed Kamala Harris’s 2024 numbers by more than 50 points. That’s a mobilization story, the same one I’ve been telling you about Harris and Dallas counties, except this time it happened in a district that hadn’t elected a Democrat to that seat in 35 years. Rehmet and Wambsganss go at it again in November for the full term, and if Tarrant Democrats can do what they did in January one more time, that seat is gone for good.
Down at the State House, the map is a little friendlier, if you squint.
Five Republican-held House seats anchor themselves in Tarrant County, and depending on how big this wave gets, we could see two of them flip. Maybe four. Maybe all five, though that’s the kind of year Democrats haven’t had here in three decades.
HD93 and HD96 are the two to watch first. HD94 is Tony Tinderholt’s old seat, now open since he’s bailing to run for Simmons’ commissioner spot, and Democrat Katie O’Brien Duzan is running there. HD96 has an open seat left by David Cool, defending against Democrat Ebony Turner, in a district that’s been quietly drifting for years.
HD98, Giovanni Capriglione’s old seat covering Keller, Colleyville, and parts of Southlake and Grapevine, is open too after his retirement, with Democrat Cate Brennan running.
HD94 and HD97 round out the list, the kind of districts that turn competitive the moment turnout ticks up, exactly like it just did in SD9.
Two of these flip in a decent night. Four flip if Tarrant does in November what it just did in January. And if all five go blue, that’s no longer a wave. That’s Tarrant County telling the rest of Texas the fight is already over.
Congressional seats to watch.
Tarrant now sits inside four competitive-adjacent congressional districts, and all four have a name on the ballot worth knowing:
TX24: Beth Van Duyne vs. Kevin Burge, a Marine Corps veteran who worked in the DIA and served in Biden’s White House Situation Room. Not a top-tier flip on paper, but this is the district that got carved through Tarrant’s fastest-diversifying suburbs, and it’s the one to watch for over-performance.
TX12: Craig Goldman vs. Heli Rodriguez-Prilliman, a Fort Worth entrepreneur running her first race. Goldman inherited Kay Granger’s old seat, and this is the most Tarrant-heavy of the four districts.
TX25: Roger Williams vs. Dione Sims, who won her primary runoff outright. This district picks up Arlington and Grand Prairie, the same ground that just delivered Rehmet’s win.
TX06: Jake Ellzey vs. Danny Minton, though only a sliver of this district touches Tarrant at all, it may be the most populated part of the district.
None of these is the marquee pickup Rehmet already delivered. But they’re the four names that turn a good night in Tarrant into a great one down-ballot, and if the county keeps trending the way Rehmet has shown it can, one of them stops being a long shot sooner than people think.
Now let’s talk about Alisa Simmons, because she’s the whole ballgame.
Simmons is the Precinct 2 commissioner Tim O’Hare told to sit down and be quiet, and this November, she’s running to replace him.
Before politics, Simmons spent 12 years as a broadcast journalist and then 18 years running budgets and public safety communications for the Tarrant County 9-1-1 District, the kind of job where you learn exactly how county government works and exactly where it breaks down. She spent ten years as president of the Arlington NAACP, served as second vice president of the Texas NAACP, and sat on the ACLU of Texas board. She ran for HD94 in 2020 and lost, then won her Precinct 2 commissioner seat in 2022. Since then, she’s been the loudest, most consistent voice on that court, demanding accountability from the jail, fighting the defunding of Girls Inc., and opposing the elimination of free rides to the polls.
When O’Hare and his Republican majority redrew her own precinct to make it harder to hold, Simmons ran countywide instead. And on March 3, she didn’t just win the Democratic primary for County Judge, she buried it.
Her platform is exactly what you’d expect from someone who’s spent years watching this county’s dysfunction up close. A full Department of Justice review of jail operations, independent oversight with actual teeth, and a direct reckoning with the 76 lives lost in that facility since 2017. She’s running on affordability, on fiscal responsibility that doesn’t require dipping into reserves to cover basic obligations, and on ending what she calls the constant partisan theater that’s replaced actual governance on that court. In her own words, it’s time for the Tarrant County government to get to work instead of getting into shouting matches.
I expect her to win in November. I’m not just saying that because I like her, although I do, a lot. I’m saying it because the numbers back it up, because O’Hare’s own party is nervous enough about Tarrant that they’re gerrymandering commissioner precincts mid-decade instead of just running on their record, and because Simmons has already shown she can win a race Republicans specifically redesigned to make sure she couldn’t.
So what does it actually take to get there?
Turnout, same as always. Tarrant County has nearly 1.5 million registered voters, and the difference between a good night and a great one lives entirely in the precincts that already agree with us and just haven’t been asked to show up yet.
The Hispanic vote that swung so hard left for Rehmet in January has to swing that way again in November, and it will, if the same organizing that worked in that special election gets replicated at scale.
The Tarrant County Democratic Party fielded its broadest slate of candidates since 1994 this cycle. That’s not an accident either. That’s what happens when people stop waiting for demographics to save them and start building the infrastructure to ensure demographics actually show up.
Tim O’Hare knows what’s coming. That’s why he’s spent his entire tenure trying to outrun it instead of earning it. Alisa Simmons is the one running straight at it.
You can learn more about Alisa Simmons on her website, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, and Threads.
If you’re in Tarrant County, please consider volunteering for her campaign.
Tarrant County doesn’t need to wait for a statewide wave to matter.
It needs its own county government back, and it’s closer than it’s been in thirty years.
Rehmet already broke the seal. Simmons is next. Somewhere between two and five House seats are up for grabs. The good old boys know it, which is why they gerrymandered instead of governing.
Show up, and Tarrant stops being the excuse Texas Republicans hide behind. It becomes the county that ends them. And in 2026, Democrats take back Tarrant County.
121 days until the November election!
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This is exciting and yet it makes me so nervous. I'm a newer precinct chair and I've had personal life stuff kind of holding me back from doing as much door-knocking as I would like. I just sat through endless speeches at the State convention which all pretty much ended with "organize, knock on doors, etc." Also, there is lots of chatter about what a linchpin Tarrant County is.
I'm not complaining, but I am starting to feel like the fate of the world hinges on Tarrant County and our efforts. I will say this though. I've made my start knocking doors and my real challenge with the (some new) Democratic voters is not convincing them to vote for Democrats, but convincing them they still have to pay attention between now and Nov. 3. Talarico is going to bring people in, but will they vote Democrat for downballot races, ie Tarrant County government?
Assuming arguendo that Talarico brings in both new voters and Republican-leaning voters, it is plausible they will split their ticket or not vote in the down ballot races. I'm afraid the nationalizing of local politics has caused people to assume that Congress is the whole ball game. 🥴
I know exactly how you feel. It’s not easy. It’s hard work. Do what you can. I appreciate anything you can do because if we all do what we can. It will make a difference. Believe it! 🙏🏼