What Do You Mean We Have Another Special Election?
Can Texas Democrats repeat their SD09 upset in another special election?
I’m usually pretty good at staying on top of these, but for some reason, I had lumped Texas Senate District 04 into the districts with regular elections. When, in fact, SD04 is having a special election. And sneaky Greg Abbott lumped it into the same dates as the city elections (updated the dates below) to improve Republican odds.
The election is between:
Why is SD04 going into a special election on May 2?
This was Senator Brandon Creighton’s seat. And if y’all remember, Creighton was a hillbilly lawyer who championed legislation to remove diversity from higher education. So, he was recently appointed Chancellor of the University of Texas Tech, leaving his Senate seat open.
SD04 isn’t a race that Democrats should treat as impossible, especially not fresh off their SD09 win, but we need to be realistic about how hard this district is. The district’s political gravity lies in Montgomery County, which accounts for the largest share of the seat. The district is made up of all of Chambers County, most of Montgomery County, plus smaller pieces of Harris, Jefferson, and a sliver of Galveston.
In 2024, Trump carried SD04 with 66.6% to Kamala Harris’ 32.4%, and Ted Cruz carried it 63.8% to Colin Allred’s 34.0%. But that was 2024. Politically, it feels like a lifetime ago. For Ron Angeletti to win this special, Democrats would need something in the neighborhood of a 15-point overperformance compared with Allred’s number to get to even, or roughly a 30-point swing from the 2024 Cruz margin.
That’s less than the swing Taylor Rehmet just did in SD09, but it’s still a huge swing.
So what would it take to flip SD04?
First, Democrats would have to run up the score in the Harris and Jefferson portions of the district and squeeze every possible vote out of the Black, Latino, and anti-MAGA suburban voters who already live there.
Second, they would need a dramatic dropoff in Republican turnout, especially in Montgomery County, because that is the GOP’s anchor inside this map.
Third, they would need to make the race about material life. Public schools. healthcare. housing costs. flood infrastructure. property taxes. utility bills.
Greg Abbott’s hopes will get drowned out by holding this race on the same date as city elections. Abbott officially set the SD04 special for May 2, with early voting beginning April 20, which means turnout math, confusion, and who actually shows up will matter almost as much as persuasion. Democrats need an SD09-style overperformance, a Republican turnout collapse, and a campaign disciplined enough to make this election about ordinary people getting squeezed.
Does the Angeletti campaign have what it takes to flip this seat in two months?
I don’t know the answer to that. When Taylor Rehmet flipped SD09, Democrats knocked on over 20,000 doors, they didn’t take a weekend off for months, and every political club in the county was all-hands-on-deck to pull off that win.
Angeletti does have the right messaging, and we shouldn’t expect Republican turnout in May to be abnormally high. Enthusiasm on the GOP side is pretty low right now.
But special elections like this are won or lost on the ground. It takes an enormous amount of block walking, phone banking, volunteer coordination, and constant presence in the district to generate the kind of turnout swing Democrats would need here.
That kind of effort doesn’t happen automatically. It requires a campaign operation that is visible, organized, and mobilizing people every single week between now and May. And again, I don’t know how serious the Angeletti campaign’s ground game is, but it needs to be ultra-serious if he wants to win.
It should be noted that the Republican in the race, Brett Ligon, is the longtime District Attorney of Montgomery County. He’s basically another Brandon Creighton. One of these good ol’ boy lawyer types, who wears $10,000 suits with cowboy hats. He’s going to have the GOP vote in Montgomery County on lockdown.
Angeletti should focus on Harris and Jefferson Counties, with weekly events, weekend door-knocking, and weekly call times. That’s what it’s going to take for him to win.
Whether SD04 flips or not, this race will tell us something important about where Texas politics is heading.
If Democrats can even make this race competitive, in a district Trump carried by more than thirty points, it will confirm what we’ve been seeing all year. The political ground in Texas is shifting faster than the pundits think.
But that shift doesn’t happen automatically. It happens because people organize. It happens because volunteers knock doors in the heat, make phone calls after work, and show up to block walks on Saturday mornings.
SD09 showed that a seat can flip if Democrats treat it like it’s winnable.
Now we’ll see if SD04 gets that same level of effort.
Because if it does, this race might surprise a lot of people.
April 2, 2026: Last day to register to vote (City elections/SD04 Special Election)
April 20, 2026: Last day to apply to vote by mail (City elections/SD04 Special Election)
April 20, 2026: First day of early voting (City elections/SD04 Special Election)
April 27, 2026: Last day to register to vote (Democratic primary runoff elections)
April 28, 2026: Last day of early voting (City elections/SD04 Special Election)
May 2, 2026: Last day to receive ballot by mail (City elections/SD04 Special Election)
May 2, 2026: Election day! (City elections/SD04 Special Election)
May 15, 2026: Last day to apply to vote by mail (Democratic primary runoff elections)
May 18, 2026: First day of early voting (Democratic primary runoff elections)
May 22, 2026: Last day of early voting (Democratic primary runoff elections)
May 26, 2026: Last day to receive ballot by mail (Democratic primary runoff elections)
May 26, 2026: Election day! (Democratic primary runoff elections)
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Thank you, Michelle-- this piece was really timely, for me. I'm grateful to know we're still connected.
Shared to bsky.
Thanks again for an informative article.
The Talarico campaign sent 4.7 million text messages in Spanish and English through volunteers directly to voters for the primary. I contributed as a volunteer in sending some of them. They used a good texting platform and had a good team of volunteers. The success rate of this text campaign can be ascertained from the Talarico campaign in terms of what percentage of the voters texted voted in the Democratic primary.
Will you please pass on this advice to the Democratic candidate to also invest in text banking where each conversation will cost around 5 or 6 cents ? He can leverage volunteers to send them. He can also use voter scores in VAN to target the Democratic leaning voters and keep cost down.
Thoughts?