Voters in North Texas rebuked former president Donald Trump on Tuesday, electing state Rep. Jake Ellzey to a vacant seat in Congress after Trump endorsed a rival Republican candidate.

Ellzey, a Navy veteran who ran on border security and stopping the Democrats’ congressional agenda, defeated Susan Wright, the widow of Rep. Ron Wright, whose death this year after contracting the coronavirus created a vacancy in Texas’s 6th Congressional District. Although Ellzey did not criticize Trump during the campaign, his allies suggested that the former president made a mistake by endorsing a first-time candidate who struggled to raise money and held few campaign events.

Ellzey declared victory two hours after the polls closed, shortly before the Associated Press projected him as the winner. He told supporters that voters had wanted “a positive outlook, a Reagan Republican outlook for the future of our country” despite a blizzard of negative ads.

Trump had sought to give Wright an election-eve boost during a telerally.

“I know her well,” the former president said of Wright. “She will be as tough as anyone in Congress.”a