Over the past couple weeks of voting, Texans woke up each day, looked at the coiffed mug of Railroad Commission GOP candidate Bo French, and—Tuesday night’s results revealed—chose electoral violence.
As of sometime after 10 p.m., French trailed Houston state Representative Jon Rosenthal for the statewide oil-and-gas regulator position by double digits. In French’s home county of Tarrant, where he previously led the county Republicans, he lagged by more than 15 points.
Around that same time, Governor Greg Abbott—long thought the most invincible of Republican statewides—conceded his race to state Representative Gina Hinojosa.
To be clear, French’s negative margin was hardly different from those of the GOP candidates for lieutenant governor, attorney general, comptroller, land commissioner, or agriculture commissioner.
Nevertheless, it’s worth taking at least a moment to savor the fact that Texans chose not to elect the most openly fascist statewide candidate in recent memory.
The guy who posted the picture of happy UT-Austin kids and said their presence, by simple virtue of race, was a “problem” for Texas. The guy who said Native Americans should be deported, to somewhere. The guy who asked whether Jewish people or Muslims were more deserving of hate. The guy who said whatever insane thing he said about the “replacement” of Europeans in their “blood-won lands.”
The guy who, on Tuesday night, ate shit—so to speak.
It’s disorienting, in a sense, to see his margin so similar to those of other politicians whose policies would certainly hurt immigrants, the poor, the environment and so forth, but in the vein of considerably more familiar and less virulently racist politics. It feels somehow that his shellacking should have stood out more from the pack.
On the other hand, well, who cares? A loss is a loss; a win is a win; and, tonight at least, God bless Texas y’all.
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