Welcome to Countywatch! This, more than anything, is a way to keep myself occupied in advance of the midterms rather than focusing too much on polls or the onslaught of new election news. I truly don’t know if anyone will read this content or find it useful, but the goal is mainly to take the thoughts in my head and put them somewhere else.
The goal of Countywatch is simple: it is to analyze elections and politics through the lens of the ever-ubiquitous county. While I plan to touch on some local politics in these pieces, I don’t have any real way to keep up with local politics in every single one of America’s counties. As such, this will mainly be focused on federal or state-level elections, just using the county as the primary vehicle of analysis. I hope to identify trends, look at interesting possibilities, and examine some history.
For now, the plan is to go county-by-county, picking some of the ones I find most interesting or that might be most relevant to the midterms. I may revisit counties for more in-depth discussions or if interesting news pops up. As I have the most familiarity with the two states I have lived in (Texas and Illinois), they will likely be overrepresented. It’s for exactly this reason that I’ve chosen to start with a Texas county: Tarrant.
Now, on to the county itself.
I. Introduction
Tarrant County is the smaller of the two principal counties of the Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex. It sits due west of Dallas County, with its seat in the city of Fort Worth. But while Fort Worth is the county’s anchor, it is hardly the only thing in Tarrant; the county also hosts the entire city of Arlington (home to, among other things, the Dallas Cowboys), and a whole host of smaller suburbs and scattered municipalities. Though Fort Worth is “where the west begins”, and its reputation evokes the old western cowtowns, Fort Worth is today a sleek, modern city that acts as one of the principal hubs of the polycentric urban sprawl that is DFW.
DFW has a long had a reputation as a more conservative place than other places of similar size, and Fort Worth in particular has been seen as the much more aggressively conservative of its two central cities. Yet Tarrant County is hardly the deeply Republican bastion it is often treated as. After flipping into the Democratic column for Beto O’Rourke’s narrow loss in 2018, Tarrant went on to vote for Joe Biden in 2020. Despite Trump narrowly winning back the county in 2024, Colin Allred also managed to eke out a win here. Tarrant has, in a sense, become Texas’ premier swing county.
A quick look at the county’s political geography reveals the stark divides within the county.
Map credit of Dave’s Redistricting App (DRA).
The county’s Democratic voters are heavily concentrated in two areas. First, in the center area at the core of the city of Fort Worth. Indeed, despite its red reputation (and its status as the largest city with an elected Republican mayor), Fort Worth has been a reliably blue city for a while now: it last voted Republican for president in 2004, though some of those subsequent Democratic victories have been squeakers (based on DRA numbers, Obama only carried the city by a single percentage point in 2012). The main driver of Fort Worth’s blue core is the area’s large Black and Hispanic populations (Fort Worth is only around 36% white); Fort Worth’s growing diversity is a large part of what has propelled Tarrant from a solid red county to a tossup.
Fort Worth, TX
2012: Obama+1
2016: Clinton+5.3
2020: Biden+11.3
2024: Harris+3
The same story applies in Arlington (35% white), which Hillary Clinton flipped in 2016 and since has consistently, if not overwhelmingly, backed Democratic candidates. Other blue pockets include the western half of the city of Grand Prairie (which goes into Dallas) and the so-called “H-E-B” cities of Hurst, Euless, and Bedford.
What keeps Tarrant purple rather than blue are the remaining parts of the county. This includes the western half of Arlington and some other parts of south-central, southwestern, and northwestern Tarrant. But the most prominent center of conservatism in Tarrant County is the northeast. Northeastern Tarrant County is composed of an array of small cities, including Keller, Grapevine, North Richland Hills, Colleyville, and Southlake. You may have heard of some of them before: maybe you’ve listened to the podcast Southlake, for instance. If so, you’re probably familiar with what these towns are known for. They are wealthy, white-majority towns which helped to inculcate modern book-banning movements on the American right. They are staunchly Republican, and more than any other part of the county are what keeps it in the Republican column. The area anchors Texas’ 24th Congressional district, which links it to what few Republican-voting areas remain in Dallas County to create one of the smallest (by area) solidly Republican-leaning districts in the nation.
But what has helped Tarrant turn from red to purple is that these areas, however conservative they remain, haven’t been stagnant. Like other wealthy, highly-educated suburbs, they’ve seen leftward shifts in the age of Trump. Take Southlake:
2012: Romney+58.6
2016: Trump+35.8
2020: Trump+24.9
2024: Trump+29.8
Despite some backsliding in 2024, Southlake still sits comfortably to the left of where it was before Trump came on to the scene.
This is the coalition that has built the modern swing Tarrant County: diverse, reliably blue cores of Fort Worth and Arlington coupled with softening Republican margins in the northeast and elsewhere.
II. Recent History
For a county with margins as narrow as Tarrant, one would expect that local Republicans might have an incentive to be a bit more moderate. And while the mayor of Fort Worth (Mattie Parker) is as close to a “moderate” as you can probably get in the Texas GOP, the rest of the county party is anything but.
In 2022, Tarrant County elected a new county judge. Despite the name, a county judge in Texas is not a judicial position; instead, county judges head the five members “Commissioners Court”, the central county government. The county judge is elected countywide, while the remaining four members are elected in individual “precincts” (districts). All of this is done on a partisan basis, and Tarrant County has fairly consistently elected Republicans to its county offices. 2022 was no different.
What was different about 2022 was who was elected. The new county judge was Tim O’Hare, a hard-right conservative who had previously served as mayor of the small city of Farmers Branch. In his tenure as mayor, the most notable thing he did was plunge the city into protracted legal battles over city ordinances intended to drive Latino immigrants out of the city. Courts repeatedly struck down the ordinances (cities don’t have constitutional authority to regulate immigration), despite the city’s repeated attempts. A good summary of the whole sordid affair can be found in this article from the Dallas Observer, aptly titled “Farmers Branch has spent 5 years and millions of dollars trying to keep out Mexicans”.
After leaving city government, O’Hare’s commitment to conservative causes didn’t stop. By 2020, O’Hare was the chair of the Tarrant County Republican Party. Around that time, Carroll Independent School District, located in Southlake, had found itself embroiled in controversy after a video of high school students saying the n-word had gone viral. In response, the district developed a “Cultural Competence Action Plan”. O’Hare responded by cofounding Southlake Families PAC, which helped boost far-right candidates opposed to the plan in the 2021 school board elections. This was the first of many similar PACs that have boosted book-banning candidates in school board elections across the country in recent years.
Then O’Hare ran for County Judge. He defeated former Fort Worth mayor Betsy Price in the primary and, in November, defeated Democratic nominee Deborah Peoples 53-47.
Perhaps the defining event of O’Hare’s tenure thus far occurred in early 2025. Before Texas began its own state-level gerrymander, kicking off the ongoing nationwide gerrymandering wars, Tarrant County decided to enact a gerrymander of its own. The existing commissioners court map, though hardly pretty, was representative of Tarrant County’s politically divided nature: it had two precincts in the county’s south, one mostly covering Fort Worth (Precinct 1) and the other occupying Arlington and Grand Prairie (Precinct 2), that reliably voted for Democrats. The two northern precincts, by contrast, consistently backed Republicans.
The new map gutted Precinct 2. The bluest parts of Arlington were instead transferred into a bizarre appendage of Precinct 1, while its redder areas were merged with red parts of 1 and 4 to create a new, more Republican-leaning precinct. The new Precinct 2 would have voted for Donald Trump by 6.3 percentage points in 2024. Rather than run in the new precinct, its commissioner Alisa Simmons instead opted to run against O’Hare himself. She is the currently Democratic candidate for county judge. (Running to replace her in Precinct 2, the Democrat is Jared Williams, while the Republican is state representative Tony Tinderholt).
Yet Tim O’Hare is arguably not the most far-right figure the Tarrant GOP has created - that honor should likely go to one Bo French, a former chair of the county GOP who, among other things, has called for deporting Native Americans. At one point, French posted a Twitter poll asking his followers whether Jews or Muslims were a bigger threat to America. That earned him a rebuke from Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick, but French did not back down. Instead, he ran against Jim Wright, an incumbent Republican on the Texas Railroad Commission (which, confusingly, regulates oil, not trains). By basing his campaign almost entirely on hot-button culture war issues like “Sharia law” and not anything the Railroad Commission actually does, French defeated Wright in a primary runoff and is currently possibly the most openly racist nominee for a statewide office in Texas since the Civil Rights era.
This is the Tarrant County Republican Party: the one that has had a unified grasp on the county for decades. Together with the state GOP, it has acted to systematically strip its minority populations of representation and pushed a far-right, reactionary agenda. Yet any path to a Democrat winning statewide has to run through Tarrant County. It is one of the nation’s most populous counties, with over 2 million people, and growing. In many ways, it is like the nation in miniature: diverse, sharply divided, and currently governed by inveterate racists.
There is good reason to hope that Democrats can break Republican rule once and for all this November. The first sign of hope came in January. Texas State Senate District 9 is entirely in Tarrant County, including parts of the city of Fort Worth and more Republican suburbs in the northwestern part of the county. Like most Texas Senate districts, it was aggressively gerrymandered to maximize Republican advantage. The seat had been abandoned by Kelly Hancock, Greg Abbott’s choice for Comptroller (who would go on to a humiliating defeat against Abbott’s former rival, Don Huffines, aka the guy who now owns Epstein Ranch, in the Republican primary). Running to replace Hancock was Leigh Wambsganss, the other co-founder of Southlake Families PAC back in 2020. The Democrat, by contrast, was Taylor Rehmet, a union leader who no one expected had much of a shot in a double-digit Trump district. But after Rehmet advanced to a runoff with Wambsganss, he won that runoff in a 14-point blowout in one of the largest leftward swings in any special election since 2024.
Rehmet still has to win reelection in November on tough terrain, but he now has the advantage of incumbency - and he’s facing Wambsganss again.
III. Conclusion
In my opinion, Tarrant is quite possibly the single most pivotal county anywhere in the country this midterm cycle. If Jared Williams can hold Precinct 2 and Alisa Simmons can knock Tim O’Hare out of office - not impossible prospects - the county would have a Democratic majority on its commissioners court. If O’Hare or Tinderholt prevail, Tarrant County keeps its GOP majority and is plunged deeper into the reactionary abyss.
But beyond a local level, Tarrant is a massive county. If a candidate like James Talarico can’t win here, and win here by a decisive margin, he has no shot statewide. Like Texas in general, the route to winning Tarrant requires winning minority voters and making inroads with white suburbanites. Though Talarico shouldn’t expect to win a place like Southlake, if he can hold Paxton’s victory there to somewhere under a 20-point margin, he’s likely in good shape. But he can’t just rely on making gains in the suburbs - he also needs Fort Worth and Arlington to have solid turnout and strong numbers for him. If he can do that, even a narrow victory here can net him tens of thousands of votes to counteract the onslaught of tiny rural R+80 counties.
Rehmet’s shocking victory shows the path to flipping Tarrant County exists. Come November, we will see if he can repeat his feat - and if Democrats can sweep this purple county at every level.