The Racism Row Threatening to Derail Texas Republicans

To what extent is America’s Republican Party racist? Not very, would be the obvious answer, considering that GOP voters have nominated Indian-American Vivek Ramaswamy to be the party’s nominee for governor of Ohio. Or given that one of the most prominent justice officials in the United States under Donald Trump is Harmeet Dhillon, the assistant attorney general. Or that JD Vance, the presumptive favorite to be the next Republican nominee for president, is married to an Indian-American woman.

Indeed, over recent electoral cycles, the Republicans have made enormous electoral inroads with ethnic minority groups: Donald Trump won more of the Hispanic vote in 2024 than any Republican nominee before him. While his gains were marginal, black support for his candidacy was also higher than expected. The same is true of almost every minority ethnic group whose political preferences are measured.

If this is a party which is reflexively hostile to ethnic minorities, then little about its makeup in 2026 provides obvious evidence to support that point.

A Tweet That Started a Fire

Or at least, it did not, until earlier this week, when the Republican nominee for railroad commissioner in Texas, a man called Bo French, posted the following to social media, captioning a photograph of what appeared to be University of Texas fans of Indian heritage celebrating a game day victory: "Like body-cams exposed criminals, social media is exposing how many Americans have been displaced by foreigners. It’s everywhere and far worse than any of us could imagine." The tweet received enormous support and relatively muted criticism from his own side:

https://twitter.com/bofrench/status/2099142867025383497

It is hard to mount any defense of what French wrote. His evidence that “Americans have been replaced” appears to amount entirely to a group of young students at the University of Texas cheering that college’s late comeback in a football game. It is about as American a scene as it is possible to imagine – one of the students is even wearing a Stetson.

The evidence that the students are not American appears to concern – and only concern – their skin color. And that is exactly how many of French’s supporters took it.

You might be interested Trump’s Children: Two Senate Races That Show a Changed America

Republicans Respond – Poorly

For establishment Republicans in Texas, responding was difficult. Governor Greg Abbott, the state’s most senior elected Republican, offered a distinctly muted response, failing to condemn French and pivoting to a discussion of immigration. "This is not my message", the governor wrote, saying no more on the matter of French's conduct.

https://twitter.com/AaronTorres_/status/2099225898968842694

Meanwhile, Attorney General Ken Paxton – himself in a tough race for the US Senate – also declined to condemn French directly, simply saying that he condemned racism "in all its forms" and then swiftly pivoting to the well-worn Republican refrain that “Democrats are the real racists”, with an attack on his Democratic opponent.

https://twitter.com/KenPaxtonTX/status/2099253987711005098

So why has this tweet caused so many problems for the Republicans? The answer is that it lies perfectly on a fault line in the party between traditional conservatives and a new, much more radicalized approach to issues of race, heritage and ethnicity.

A Fault Line in the Modern Right, Brutally Exposed

For conservatives, in theory, the sight of many Indian-Americans celebrating an American football victory for a Texan team while wearing cowboy hats is the Platonic ideal of their version of America: a melting pot in which migrants and people of all backgrounds come together to shed their old cultures in favor of building a new world of freedom and liberty. In European terms, the students at UT have done exactly what the right claims that so many migrants in Europe have failed to do: they have integrated and become American – not only in name but in practice.

Yet, for a great many on the new right, the goalposts appear to have moved. French’s tweet explicitly ties two concepts together visually: race and nationality. It comes as close as it is possible to saying outright that Americans are white, and that those who are not white are not real Americans, but replacements.

You might be interested “I’m in”: Dead Senator’s Sister Runs to Keep His Seat

This is a position that few politicians advocate openly – but the 26,000 likes on French’s tweet and the continued flow of endorsements and support for his campaign from the right after he sent it suggest that it is a position that a growing number of voters are comfortable with, even if they do not embrace it fully themselves.

No Enemies to the Right

There is another fault line on which French’s tweet lies: the ever-growing section of the right-wing electorate which appears to regard any policing of one’s own side as treason against the much more important cause of defeating Democrats and progressives. If the question is “Do you agree with Bo French that ethnically Indian people cannot be Americans?” a great many voters may, hopefully, still answer in the negative. But ask those same voters, “Is Bo French better than a Democrat?” and almost all would answer that he is.

French’s own electoral race is relatively insignificant. But for Republicans like Abbott and Paxton, running in nationally important elections, criticizing one of their own may be politically more dangerous than failing to condemn racism, for fear that some of their voters might turn on them for treasonous conduct.

Yet all of this has a cost for the party.

Electoral Costs

As noted above, the irony of this particular outburst is not merely that Indian-Americans have integrated into American activities like supporting American football teams, but that they have also integrated into the Republican Party and conservatism. In 2024, Donald Trump won fully a third of all votes cast by that demographic, despite Kamala Harris being of Indian-American heritage herself. The Indian-American vote contributed nearly 600,000 ballots to Trump nationally.

In Texas, the Republicans are in very tight races. For the first time in decades, there is a very real prospect that the Democrats will actually take one of the state’s two seats in the US Senate – and several seats in the US House are also at stake. Even if losing Indian-American votes alone would not cost those seats, the damage the row will do among moderate white voters cannot be discounted.

The calculation Republicans involved in those elections appear to be making is that it is too politically dangerous to challenge one of their own candidates for an objectively racist tweet. Or at least, that doing so would cost them more votes from their own side than saying little will cost them from everyone else.

That says a lot about the state of the party in 2026. Little of it good.