Bo French was just one among the many losers in last Tuesday’s statewide Democratic sweep in Texas. French, who was running for a seat on the powerful Texas Railroad Commission (which regulates the state’s oil and gas industry), had attracted public outrage for an X post of a photo of Indian students at a UT Austin football game. “I heard UT graduation this year looked like this,” French wrote. “I didn’t believe it. The problem is now obviously far worse than anyone imagined.”
It’s unclear whether French’s remarks were what cost him his election. Gov. Greg Abbott lost by roughly the same margin, and Senate nominee Ken Paxton by nearly twice as much. But all three performed worse than other statewide Republicans. And French measurably underperformed in South Asian areas, specifically.
For some, though, the obvious cause of Republicans’ comprehensive defeat was the demographic change that had alarmed French in the first place. “Demographics is destiny,” wrote commentator Benny Johnson, noting that Texas is fifty percentage points less white than it was in 1970. Greg Bovino, the former Border Patrol commander who led the crackdown in Minneapolis, blamed Abbott’s loss on votes from H-1B immigrants from India, of whom “70 to 80 percent vote democrat.” Other pundits piled on with the same message: Democrats won, in Texas and elsewhere, because non-white immigrants voted for them overwhelmingly.
The trouble with this argument is not just that it is wrong on the facts, although it is. Nor is the problem that these influencers are speaking some forbidden truth. The trouble, rather, is that their theory absolves Republicans of responsibility for their historic loss. When you blame an election on the inexorable march of demographic change, you erase the poor policy choices that caused the electorate to swing wildly against the GOP in just two years.
“Their theory absolves Republicans of responsibility for their historic loss.”
In a much-discussed 2019 essay, Sohrab Ahmari (who would go on to co-found Compact) diagnosed a pathology of the “Never Trump” right that he labeled “David French-ism,” after now-New York Times columnist David French. David French-ism, in Ahmari’s telling, is the compulsive love of principled losing, a tendency to be a stickler for rules and norms even if and when following those rules and norms allows the left to run roughshod over America. The Trump-inspired right, if it stood for anything, was then understood to be against David French-ism. What mattered was winning.
Today, parts of the post-Trump right have developed their own pathological love of losing. Call it Bo French-ism. This French-ism has found particular purchase on the online right, but also influence offline, especially on the mind of Elon Musk. While Bo French-ism did not cause Republicans’ historic loss, it threatens to cement it, by abandoning the nascent Trump coalition—a sustainable path forward for the GOP—in favor of the pleasures of pessimism.
Bo French-ism starts with the belief that, as Johnson put it (echoing many others before him) “demographics is destiny.” Devotees divide American electoral politics into whites (especially white men) who vote for the GOP; and everyone else, who votes for the Democrats. Thus the inference that, for example, Republicans’ historic loss in Mississippi’s and Kansas’s senate races are attributable to demographic change in those states.
Implicit in this view is the idea that turnout, not persuasion, is what drives elections. To win, Bo French-ists tend to argue, conservatives should play to (what they believe to be) the base, rather than trying to pull the median voter into the coalition. Non-white voters’ are taken to be not only Democrats, but inalterably so—they can’t have their minds changed. Therefore, the most important factor is the ratio of white turnout to non-white turnout.
This theory of turnout affects how the new Frenchists think about political rhetoric. When French himself tweeted his alarm at seeing Indians having fun at a college football game, he was presumably trying to mobilize a base of voters who share that sentiment, even at the cost of upsetting Indians. These are the same people, presumably, that the Department of Homeland Security is trying to talk to when it promises 100 million deportations, or that Bovino was trying to impress with his fancy get-up in Minneapolis. In all of these cases, the goal is either to mobilize the base or—as often, if not more so—simply signal your commitment to principle, even at the expense of electoral success.
In all of this, the Bo French-ists demonstrate an interesting parallel with the DSA wing of the Democratic Party. Bernie Sanders Progressives, too, tend to emphasize turnout over persuasion, arguing that their policy priorities will mobilize the base even if they alienate the center. As my Manhattan Institute colleague Jesse Arm has noted, the GOP’s activist class is for the first time to the right of its voters, much as the Democrats’ activists have long been to their voters’ left. It’s thus no coincidence that the same attitude prevails among influential parts of both parties: the way to win is to go whole hog on what they believe.
What’s wrong with this theory? Whites do tend to vote for Republicans, while non-whites do tend to vote for Democrats. But these tendencies are not, contrary to the French-ists, immutable. That’s clear even in the most recent election. Exit polling finds, for example, that Latino men swung by 25 points, from voting majority Republican to voting majority Democrat, in just two years. Nor, for that matter, are whites an immoveable bloc for the GOP. Democrats won this cycle with the support of young whites generally and young white men specifically. That’s part of the steady loss of the GOP’s support among college-educated whites.
Indeed, such shifting electoral preferences were central to Donald Trump’s victory in 2024. Trump gained enormous ground among non-white voters of all stripes, especially non-white men—a gain in turn that’s part of the GOP’s longer-term erosion of Democrats’ control of non-white voters. He accomplished this, moreover, not through racial and ethnic pandering, but through focusing on economic and culture-war issues where the median voter was aligned with him—rather than trying to focus on only his base. Ads talking about gender ideology, public safety, and inflation resonated with median Americans, not just the base, and helped propel Trump to victory.
Some will object that by criticizing this tendency, I am trying to censor discussion of the electoral effects of immigration. While I personally dislike French and others’ rhetoric, I also think reasonable people can have concerns with, and vote to address, the pace of immigration. Failure to recognize the electorate’s legitimate unhappiness with 11 million illegal border crossings in four years is part of how Kamala Harris lost to Donald Trump in 2024.
Nor is it the case that Bo French-ism itself cost Republicans the 2026 midterms. That was plainly the combination of an unpopular war in Iran and ever-shifting tariffs contributing to the nation’s affordability crisis, compounded by the administration’s botched efforts at implementing its deportation agenda and the president’s shady dealings while in an office of public trust.
However, Bo French-ism is sufficiently influential in certain corners that it could cause the broader movement to fail to internalize the election’s lessons. It offers a ready-made, ideologically acceptable explanation not only for what happened, but for why all future elections will probably cash out the same way. It offers the tempting idea that the GOP doesn’t need to learn from its loss, or try to actually persuade Americans it’s worth letting the party govern again.
There is a narcotic comfort in such complacency. But politics is about winning. That means assembling a durable majority coalition, including through persuasion. If Kansas and Mississippi can turn blue in just two years, then surely anybody’s votes are up for grabs. Conservatives should act like it.
The problem with the “zombie Reaganite” right, the Trump right used to say, is that they prefer losing on principle to winning. The trouble with the Bo French-ists is that they, too, would prefer to be beautiful losers.