Karl Rove will vote for a Democrat in November, only the second of his life, because the Republican nominee to regulate Texas oil and gas posted a photo of South Asian students at a Longhorns game and called them foreigners. The strategist behind George W. Bush’s two presidential campaigns is so far the most prominent Republican to turn a condemnation of Bo French into a vote against him.
The more revealing document is not Rove’s. It is the list of Texas Republicans still formally behind French, which the Texas Tribune’s guide to the Railroad Commission race lays out. Gov. Greg Abbott is on it, four months after warning that French’s agenda would wreck the state’s oil and gas boom. Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick is on it, a year after calling on French to resign as Tarrant County GOP chair over a poll asking whether Jews or Muslims were the bigger threat to America. Both sitting railroad commissioners are on it. So is the political arm of the Texas Oil and Gas Association, which represents 90% of statewide production and endorsed French the week before his post.
French posted on Sunday morning, after Texas came back to upset Ohio State. “I heard UT graduation this year looked like this,” he wrote over a photo of South Asian students in burnt orange. “I didn’t believe it. The problem is now obviously far worse than anyone imagined.” A second post said the scene showed “how many Americans have been displaced by foreigners,” though he had no information about any student’s immigration status. Sen. John Cornyn, who lost his primary to Ken Paxton in May, asked within hours whether other Republicans would “condemn the intolerance and racism, or look the other way while it becomes normalized.” French called Cornyn a RINO and kept posting.
Rove answered on Monday. At a members-only lunch at Austin’s Headliners Club he called French a “bigot” and said he would vote for Democrat Jon Rosenthal, three attendees told the Texas Tribune. The only other Democrat he has ever voted for was Lt. Gov. Bob Bullock, in 1994. Donald Trump answered the same day on Truth Social, calling Rove “a stone cold loser” with “a major case of Trump Derangement Syndrome,” in a post that did not mention French, the students or the race. On Wednesday Rove made it official in a Wall Street Journal op-ed, calling French’s claim “raw, uncut bigotry” and writing, “These people are diminishing the Republican Party, not building it. I’ll have no part of it.”
So how did the party’s leadership end up behind a candidate it spent the spring trying to stop? The primary settled it. A PAC funded by oil billionaires Tim Dunn and Farris Wilks put roughly $1 million, more than 60% of French’s war chest, into unseating Railroad Commissioner Jim Wright, the Tribune reported after the May runoff. French branded the incumbent “Jihadi Jim” and ran on DEI and Sharia law, not drilling permits. Abbott, Patrick and House Speaker Dustin Burrows all backed Wright, and Abbott campaigned for him in Deer Park, saying French “doesn’t know anything about oil and gas.” French won anyway, and the endorsements followed him into the general election.
That is the system doing what it was built to do, which is the problem. The Railroad Commission has not regulated railroads since 2005; it oversees oil and gas production, pipelines and the penalties levied on the industry now endorsing French. A regulated industry wants access to whoever holds the permit pen, and a governor wants a unified ticket. Run that at scale and every future candidate learns the same lesson: win the primary with billionaire money, and the establishment that fought you will stand behind you in November, whatever you post in between. Abbott’s own response proved the point. He declined to condemn the posts, said the photo “actually shows a way that Texans unite,” and moved on to his freeze on H-1B visas at state universities.
Rove is right, and he is right in the only currency that counts. A condemnation that leaves the endorsement standing is a permission slip. Burrows said the post “crossed the line.” Former Speaker Dade Phelan called French “unfit for office.” State Rep. Drew Darby, who chairs the House Energy Resources Committee, said he had “never seen conduct so unbecoming of a Railroad Commissioner.” None of it costs French a single vote. The oil and gas association’s answer on Monday was to share Burrows’s condemnation on social media, days after its own PAC had endorsed French. Abbott, Patrick and the industry PAC should withdraw their endorsements this week, and if they will not, Texans should read the endorsement list, not the statements, as the party’s actual position.
The Democrat on the other side of all this is not a protest vote. Rosenthal is a four-term Houston state representative and a career oil-field mechanical engineer with more than two decades in the business, running for a seat no Democrat has held in decades. Paxton, now the Senate nominee facing Democrat James Talarico on the same ballot, said he condemns “racism in all of its forms” without naming French, who he had earlier said would be “a great Railroad Commissioner.” Darby attached a warning to his criticism: the Legislature gave the commission broad discretion because it trusted the people serving on it, and “that trust can be revisited.” That is the second-order cost nobody in the endorsement column is pricing in. If French wins, the industry that endorsed him could watch a Republican Legislature narrow its own regulator’s authority, and Rove’s one vote starts to look less like a protest than the cheaper option.