Hoping to preserve his narrow majority, U.S. House Speaker Mike Johnson campaigned alongside Matt Van Epps, who narrowly won a December 2025 special election in a strongly Republican district in Tennessee.

(BOISE, IDAHO) On Feb. 7, 2026, Chasity Verret Martinez won a special election to fill a vacant seat in the Louisiana House. That’s an outcome that might not mean very much to people outside of the state or even outside her Baton Rouge-area district.

But Martinez is a Democrat who took 62% of the vote in a district that had given Donald Trump a 13-percentage-point victory in the 2024 presidential race. And her win came a week after Democrats seized a Texas Senate district that had supported Trump even more strongly – a result that immediately triggered concern in Republican circles.

Originally published on theconversation.com, part of the BLOX Digital Content Exchange.

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