Texas Gov Greg Abbott addresses former U.S. President Donald Trump in Weslaco, Texas, U.S. June 30, 2021. Brandon Bell / Pool via REUTERS
The right wing can't stop the changes in Texas.
Houston Chronicle journalist and columnist Chris Tomlinson reported on Thursday that Fort Worth, Texas, isn't what it once was — and those changes likely won't end with the 2026 midterm election.
Tomlinson spoke to Republican state Senate candidate Leigh Wambsganss, who once said that she wasn't merely a MAGA Republican but she was “Ultra-MAGA." Like Rep. Byron Donalds (R-Fla.), however, she began scrubbing President Donald Trump from her website. In fact, she's removing the word "Republican" too.
"The once bright red color is now dark blue," said Tomlinson.
"Wambsganss made her name as political director for Patriot Mobile, a Christian nationalist wireless provider that backed fundamentalists in school board elections," the Chronicle reported. "She was once considered a shoo-in on the party’s conservative fringe, where Fort Worth politicians have traditionally done well."
That has changed significantly. Wambsganss previously lost the seat to Democrat Taylor Rehmet in a Feb. 2026 special election.
The report said the state is experiencing one of the biggest political shifts since 1820. Demographics are changing, economics are changing and with it the social shifts and politics come with it.
Now, Wambsganss' campaign is looking a lot like Rehmet's.
"Her strategy of running away from her past begs the question: Are voters leaving the Republican Party, or is President Donald Trump’s Republican Party leaving them?
The important part to know about the Fort Worth area is that it wasn't along ago that "white men chased Black Union soldiers from a polling station in Falls County," Tomlinson recalled from a story his great-grandfather told him. His grandfather was a member of the Dallas Klan, believing that "God intended for them to rule the world." The Klan controlled both Dallas and Forth Worth.
In all of Texas' 254 counties, "Fort Worth and Tarrant County have always leaned hardest to the right," the reporter explained.
Rehmet told him, “They've lost a lot of folks in the middle. We can talk here all day about Republican-Democrat, but most people are just regular working folks. They don't have the luxury to really be super politically active. They're working two jobs. They're taking care of their kids. And those are the folks that I think of whenever I'm ready to go serve, because that's the majority of this district.”
Tony Ortiz, the publisher of the right-wing daily newspaper Current Revolt, said that a lot of this comes down to immigration and the harsh policies from the Republicans to remove anyone who may look like an immigrant, regardless of whether they are criminals, documented or not. It isn't isolated to Latinos either; he said that those in North Texas are worried about "South Asians and Muslims."
The Tarrant County diversity shift began in 2015, though whites still dominate the county's population.
“A lot of this is like a sudden realization of an entire demographic realizing that they are becoming the minority,” Ortiz said. “You blink and you’ve got all of these temples and restaurants and mosques and different driving habits and different languages, and you think, ‘Whoa, what happened?’”
“You think, ‘I need to do something,’ but you’re a little late in doing something. You should have been doing something maybe five, seven or eight years ago,” he explained.
Ortiz identifies as "brown," and accepts his Mexican American heritage.
President Donald Trump and Vice President JD Vance are set to appear in the state this week, where they will celebrate all of the work they've done on "the economy," another report from the Houston Chronicle said.