Axis Daily Brief | Texas Republicans Don’t Want to be Called Racist

Summary

The Quiet Part, Out Loud

The Republicans in Texas have new reason to worry this week, and it highlights a lot about the realities confronting the Texas GOP. I think it also reveals a lot about the contemporary Republican Party in the United States as a whole.

Most people following politics are already familiar with the headwinds confronting Republicans in Texas. Texas has one of the highest Hispanic populations in the country, and despite swinging record numbers of Hispanic voters to the GOP in 2024 — genuinely historic numbers of Hispanic voters supporting Donald Trump and other Republicans — Hispanic support for Republicans has been slipping steadily ever since. Following the 2024 election, there were triumphant announcements from the Republican Party that a new era of coalition-building was underway, one that would usher in a new political age. But that hasn’t held.

Put those two facts together — a very high Hispanic population in Texas, and declining Hispanic support for Republicans — and you have one of the issues that genuinely concerns the GOP in Texas right now.

Why This Matters for November

This matters because Democratic Senate candidate James Talarico currently leads GOP candidate Ken Paxton in most polls. If Talarico wins, it would mark the first time the Democratic Party has won a U.S. Senate seat in Texas in decades — and it would meaningfully increase the odds that Democrats retake the Senate in the midterms.

So the GOP in Texas is sitting on two anxieties at once: declining minority support for the party, and a real, live threat of a Democratic senator coming out of Texas. Against that backdrop, the Texas GOP has been eager to convince Hispanic and other minority voters that despite the party’s economic policies — policies that have harmed minority voters of nearly every kind — Republicans really do care about and support Hispanic Americans.

This week, a Republican nominee for the Texas Railroad Commissioner position made that job considerably harder.

The Post

Bo French posted an image on X of University of Texas students celebrating a Longhorns game — just a photo of students at a football game. The students in the image appeared to include a number of people of South Asian descent. Above the photo, French wrote:

The post set off a firestorm inside the Texas GOP, with many condemning it and a few even calling it what it plainly is: racist. But notably, almost no one in the Texas GOP called for French to withdraw from the race. And French himself has stood by his comments. In an interview on Sunday, he said it is “not racist to point out that we should be favoring Texans over foreigners.”

So here’s the shape of the story: a member of the GOP makes comments widely viewed as racist, causing most of the Texas GOP — especially candidates in tight or contested races — to panic publicly, while the politician in question stands by his statement with the quiet support of other party members. That’s the version of the story you’ll find in most news outlets, and it’s worth reading. But the coverage tends to stop at exactly the point where it gets interesting.

What the Coverage Misses

Most reporting on this frames the story around damage control — Republican strategists explaining that comments like French’s make outreach to Hispanic and other minority voters more difficult. That’s true. But it treats French’s post as a communications problem rather than what it actually is: Bo French saying the quiet part out loud.

Yes, the GOP wants to win over Hispanic and other minority voters. But the party’s policies, its priorities, and its rhetoric — both since 2024 and well before it — make clear that most of the GOP doesn’t actually hold positions all that far from French’s. When strategists complain that statements like his make outreach “difficult,” they’re skipping past the more uncomfortable fact: they want those votes without having to actually support American minorities.

What a post like French’s reveals isn’t a position that most of the GOP finds offensive. It’s a position most of the GOP quietly shares but goes to considerable lengths to avoid saying in public. They don’t view Hispanic Americans, or South Asian American students, as real Americans — or in this case, as real Texans.

French actually said something in his own defense that I agree with. In that same interview, he suggested his fellow Republicans share his sentiments but are simply afraid of being labeled racist. In other words: they think what he thinks, they just don’t want to be called out for it. I think French is a racist, I think the post was racist, and I agree with him that many in the GOP share his views — no matter what they tell minority voters to convince them otherwise.

What the Post Actually Reveals

Look closely at what French actually said and the logic falls apart in a revealing way. He decries that the UT graduating class “looks like this,” pointing to an image of students who appear to be of South Asian descent. Then, in his follow-up interview, he says the university should be serving “Texans” — the implication being that none of the students in the photo are Texan.

He has no reason to think that. He has no way of knowing that. The only reason he says it is that he is profiling these students based on how they look. They don’t read as Texan to him — which is to say, they aren’t white.

That’s the assumption underneath French’s comments: that people of color simply aren’t real Texans, and by extension, aren’t real Americans. It doesn’t even occur to him that someone could be both a person of color and a Texan. In his mind, their presence in that photo means non-Americans are being served by the University of Texas, and that this shouldn’t be happening.

The Deeper Ideology

I think this is the real revelation about the Christian nationalist ideology that defines the contemporary Republican Party. The GOP wants minority votes — it actively courts them. But within that ideology, within that worldview, there is no actual place for minority voters as full participants in the party’s vision of America. It’s a vision of a white Christian nation, and minority communities don’t fit inside it as anything other than instrumental.

Instead, in the GOP imagination, minority communities tend to occupy one of two roles:

* A problem to be solved — deported if they’re not citizens, denaturalized if the assumption is (wrongly) made that they aren’t, treated by default as if they don’t belong.

* A resource to be drawn on strategically, but only when needed — courted in 2024, then largely ignored since, with no follow-through on the “coalition-building” that was promised. Now, heading into the 2026 midterms, the party needs those votes again, so the courting resumes.

What doesn’t have a place in that ideology is the idea that minority communities represent real Americans — full stop, not conditionally, not strategically. That’s what Bo French’s post shows us, whether he meant to reveal it or not.

What Comes Next

This is a story worth continuing to watch, especially with the 2026 midterms bearing down and the Texas Senate race as competitive as it’s been in decades. It’ll be worth watching how the Texas GOP handles French going forward — whether the discomfort passes, whether he faces any real consequences, or whether, as seems likely, the party quietly moves on while hoping voters forget.

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