Bo French is a Republican politician running for election to an obscure regulatory body called the Texas Railroad Commission. He was a nobody until his social media post showing South Asian students in cowboy hats celebrating the University of Texas’s American football team’s victory went viral this week.

“I heard UT graduation this year looked like this,” French smirked on X. “I didn’t believe it. The problem is now obviously far worse than anyone imagined.”

At a swoop, the Republican Party’s problem with racism was out in the open. Here was evidence in French’s post and the replies it generated that it wasn’t just illegal immigrants who weren’t welcome in the US to some representatives of Donald Trump’s GOP, but anybody who wasn’t a “heritage” American (meaning a person with white ancestry). And the voters have noticed.

Six weeks before the midterm elections, French’s post has become a symbol of the breakdown of Trump’s winning 2024 coalition of Hispanics, Asian-American, young and white working-class voters. If the Republicans lose control of the House, and possibly the Senate, on 3 November, this will be why. According to a 2024 NBC exit poll, 46 per cent of Hispanics, 43 per cent of young voters under 30 and 40 per cent of Asian Americans voted for Donald Trump as president.

All but the most Maga, predominantly white voters are peeling away, according to a New York/Siena poll this week. This found that Hispanic voters favoured the Democrats by 43 points, young voters under 30 backed them by 35 points, while “other non-white voters” supported the Democrats by 12 points.

Karl Rove, George W Bush’s former adviser, who helped turn Texas into solid Republican territory by wooing Hispanic voters, declared that he would vote Democrat for the first time to thwart French.

Writing in the , Rove condemned the “raw, uncut bigotry” in French’s post. Then, he broadened his attack on the entire Republican Party. “There are ‘just asking questions’ Jew-haters, misogynists who worship hypermasculinity, conspiracy nuts seeking clicks for profit, and religious bigots who won’t differentiate between Muslim terrorists and Muslim American patriots.”

“I’ll have no part of it,” he concluded. “The GOP stables need cleaning.” Rove’s article elicited a furious response from inside Maga along the lines of “He would say that, wouldn’t he”, as a former Bush supporter rather than a true believer. But he’s not alone in fearing the rise of white supremacists and racists in the Republican Party.

The conservative commentator Rod Dreher, a former friend of Vice President JD Vance, warned in the last year that up to 30-40 per cent of young Republican staffers in Washington were “groypers” – fans and fellow travellers of Nick Fuentes, an avowed admirer of Hitler. Dreher alleges Vance ended their friendship after he urged the Vice-President to disown them. Top staff at the Heritage Foundation, a Washington think-tank that supports the mass deportation of immigrants, resigned in disgust last year after the head of the organisation refused to criticise broadcaster Tucker Carlson for hosting Fuentes on his show.

But these rows caused mere ripples within the Republican movement, not outright fractures. What made French’s post so damaging is that it confirmed the fears of many ethnic minority voters that Maga doesn’t believe they belong in the United States, no matter how legal or “assimilated” they are. The arbitrary detention of US citizens and law-abiding residents seeking to renew their visas by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has featured prominently on Spanish-language television stations, sparking widespread fear.

Around the same time as Rove launched his broadside, Florida republican representative Maria Salazar directly criticised Trump’s immigration policy in a campaign ad. “Mr President, some of your immigration enforcement efforts have gone too far,” she asserted on camera. “The same Hispanics who helped you get to the White House in 2024 feel betrayed today.”

Salazar won a Miami district that is 74 per cent Hispanic by 20 points at the last election. But the ICE dragnet is terrorising anti-socialist Cuban and Venezuelan communities in Florida that used to form the backbone of Trump’s support. In the ad, she pointed out, “In July, 50 per cent of ICE detainees had no criminal convictions or pending charges.”

It’s the same story in Texas, where a widely-distrusted Maga politician, Ken Paxton, is running for the Senate against a mild-mannered Democrat, James Talarico. The contest should be a shoo-in for Paxton, but the two men are neck and neck. Roughly 41 per cent of Texans are Hispanic, and Asian-Americans make up just over six per cent of the state population. Together they represent a formidable voting bloc.

Nationally, the New York Times/Siena poll found voters favoured the Democrats on immigration by 52-45 points and on the economy by 51-45 points, issues that drove Trump’s presidential victory. Overall, 51 per cent of likely voters said they would vote Democratic in the midterms compared to 43 per cent for the Republican Party. The newspaper suggested this pointed to a “blue wave” in the midterms but added some significant caveats, such as the impact of redistricting and gerrymandering.

The poll also revealed that 50 per cent of likely voters thought the Democrats were “too far left”. The Democratic election expert Ruy Teixeira says this points to a long-term vulnerability. The party needs “genuinely conservative Democrats, and they really don’t have any,” he argued in a recent Substack post.

Be that as it may, the short-term forecast for the Republican Party is blue. If the Democrats can’t pull off a midterm victory this November, they should hang up their boots in shame.