Saturday, October 10, 2026
The GOP’s Message to Both Citizens and Immigrants: Be White and Christian
Only a few decades ago, Republican presidents would happily evoke the idea of America as a haven for people around the world. Ronald Reagan, in his farewell speech, declared that “anyone, from any corner of the Earth, can come to live in America and become an American.” Reagan was no paragon of racial tolerance—he opposed the civil-rights movement and privately referred to Black people as “monkeys”—but he did not regard the presence of nonwhite people as an existential threat to America. For years the Republican Party insisted that what it wanted was a certain kind of immigrant—highly skilled people who came here legally, or even, not that long ago, those brought to the U.S. as children who lacked status through no fault of their own and had long since assimilated.
That Republican Party no longer exists. Today the GOP’s view is that almost all immigration—by which the Trump administration seems to mean nonwhite immigration, euphemistically referred to as “Third World” immigration—is bad. That view can be summed up by Homeland Security’s celebratory announcement on X last week that the country was seeing a decline in naturalizations, as if the decline itself were self-evidently a good thing: . . . . The “right” kind of immigrant seems to have become a much narrower category, one defined not by people’s education, potential, or ties to the country, but simply by whether they are white and Christian.
A recent Fox News headline exulted: “Republican Glee Erupts as White House Boasts Sharp Decline in Immigration From Muslim-Majority Nations.” These people could be doctors, engineers, or artists, but if they’re from a “Muslim-majority country,” these Republicans don’t want them here. . . . This is the language of racial purity, and it is not a concept that confines itself to immigration. It suggests that Americans who do not fit the Trump administration’s preferred “demographics” do not belong.
In the many parts of the United States where the native-born population is declining, communities desperately need immigrants. This is true in areas of Ohio, where Haitian immigration has contributed to an economic revival. But to President Trump, Haiti is a “shithole” country, and all Haitians are invaders to be expelled. . . . in July, Haitians in Ohio began being fitted with ankle monitors.
Pierre Damas Bel was in college at Wright State University in Ohio when he was issued his bulky ankle monitor. He was an athlete. And he hoped to study neuroscience and be a doctor. He was exactly the kind of young person whom previous versions of the Republican Party would have seen as an American success story. But he was a Haitian immigrant, so he was not wanted by the Trump administration, which did not seem to care who he was, or who he might become. In September, he called his father to say he felt “humiliated.” CNN reported that soon after, police told his father that he had “thrown himself under a truck.”
A year ago, The New York Times obtained documents submitted to the president by officials at the Departments of State and Homeland Security claiming that “the sharp increase in diversity has reduced the level of social trust essential for the functioning of a democratic polity,” and arguing that the U.S. should admit only “refugees who can be fully and appropriately assimilate [sic], and are aligned with the president’s objectives.”
We now know what was meant by this. The Trump administration has turned refugee admissions into a virtually whites-only program for Afrikaners from South Africa. The applications of these so-called refugees—who do not face significant levels of persecution—are being processed quickly, while those of other groups around the world have largely been suspended. . . but it has supported South Africans in this whites-only refugee program at taxpayer expense.
The Afrikaner policy is illuminating, because it proves the catch-22 facing nonwhite immigrants: If you are poor, you are a moocher, and if you are gainfully employed, you are taking a job from a hardworking American. The only way to be a good immigrant is to be white and Christian.
Bo French, who is running for a seat on the Texas Railroad Commission, has taken this idea a step further, suggesting that the only way to be an American is to be white and Christian.
Last month, French responded to a photograph of Asian students cheering the University of Texas football team by posting, “I heard UT graduation this year looked like this. I didn’t believe it. The problem is now obviously far worse than anyone imagined,” adding that “social media is exposing how many Americans have been displaced by foreigners.”
State law requires that 90 percent of UT’s students be from Texas; only 10 percent can be international or out-of-state students. French had no idea of the citizenship status of the young people in the photo. What made the students “foreigners” to French was that they were not white.
The conservative activist Christopher Rufo discussed French’s comments on a podcast with Jonathan Keeperman, who leads a book publisher of conservative titles. Keeperman explained that “the mere fact of us being able to notice that No, this is not an assimilated group, this is just a bunch of Indians at the game is itself sort of definitionally the case that they’re not yet assimilated.” What makes them not assimilated? Nothing more than the opinion of a guy who looks at a picture and sees, as Keeperman put it, “just a bunch of Indians.”
It is difficult to imagine a behavior more indicative of assimilation than rejoicing in the victory of your college football team in Texas. And that’s the point: Assimilation is no longer about going to school, getting a job, speaking English, and embracing local culture. It’s about being white and Christian.
In recent years, many conservatives have championed a kind of reactionary “color-blindness” that insists that any race-conscious effort to alleviate discrimination is itself equivalent to racial discrimination. White people earned their success, this argument assumes, but people in all other groups were given unfair advantages—a notable inversion of American history.
[T]he success of nonwhite people remains suspect. In fact, that success is evidence that something is deeply wrong with the system. As my colleague Jonathan Chait wrote about the Rufo and Keeperman podcast, “Resentment of these immigrant communities is understandable, the two men explained, not in spite of the fact that so many South Asians have been successful academically and economically, but because of it.” If “meritocracy” does not produce an overwhelming white majority in elite spaces such as Texas’s flagship public university, what good is it?
Color-blind meritocracy was, for many years, a successful rhetorical strategy for undermining antidiscrimination law and excluding Black people from selective schools and prominent positions. That’s why so many former segregationists seemed to suddenly embrace the concept in the 1970s. For them, resegregation—not color-blindness—was always the goal.
The declining “social trust” that the administration warned against is, of course, not the fault of these students. The problem is bigots like Bo French who cannot accept into their community people who do not share their race and religion, and those who monetize or otherwise profit from that bigotry by spreading it through social media. Like the proverbial child who kills their parents and asks for mercy as an orphan, they are responsible for the problem they are decrying.
Perhaps more significant than French’s remarks is that few Republican politicians in Texas were willing to criticize them. . . . The former Bush adviser Karl Rove, hardly a liberal squish, complained that “my party is being infiltrated by people like Bo French. Nick Fuentes goes to Dallas and meets with a bunch of Republican leaders. This guy is a Nazi.” I’m afraid that these people have not “infiltrated” the Republican Party. Today, they are the Republican Party.
Friday, October 09, 2026
In Texas, MAGA Voters Are Breaking Ranks
Lynn Davenport, a lifelong conservative, met Donald Trump backstage at a Texas rally in 2016. On Jan. 6, 2021, she was at his Stop the Steal rally in Washington, though she left before the Capitol was sacked. In 2024, she was a delegate to Texas’ Republican convention and a Republican precinct chair.
And in May, she filmed an ad for Gina Hinojosa, the Democrat running a surprisingly competitive race to become governor of Texas.
The two women have been friends for years, since Hinojosa, a state representative from Austin, helped lead opposition to a crusade by the Republican governor, Greg Abbott, to privatize Texas’ public school system. Abbott’s agenda was bitterly opposed by some conservative Texans, particularly rural ones in places where public schools are the center of the community. . . . Still, as a committed Republican, she didn’t think she’d ever vote for her.
But Davenport has grown increasingly disgusted with Abbott, over both schools and the data centers he invited into Texas. The governor, she said, is a “globalist. Which to me is scarier than a communist, a socialist or a Marxist, because what Abbott is imposing is technocracy. He’s giving the tech giants carte blanche in Texas.” . . . “Gina is someone that I can work with, whereas Abbott doesn’t care what I think,” she told me.
The premise of Hinojosa’s surprisingly competitive campaign is that there’s a critical mass of voters like Davenport in Texas. The opportunity for Democrats, Hinojosa believes, lies not with moderate, affluent Republicans put off by Trump’s norm-smashing vulgarity, but with disappointed MAGA populists. “The conventional political wisdom is that it is those country club Republicans who will swing over,” she told me before I traveled to Texas. “I think it’s always been MAGA.”
I’m still not wholly convinced. Trump’s appeal has never been only or even primarily economic; he taps into fear and rage about a country growing less white, less Christian and less deferential to male authority. And Hinojosa seems, at least on paper, ill suited to appeal to Trump’s base. . . . Though she now calls herself a “populist” rather than a “progressive,” she’s one of the more liberal members of the Texas House.
Still, Hinojosa has a group of supporters like Davenport, people furious at Abbott over school privatization and data centers. Mary Lowe, an education activist and a self-described “fundamental Christian,” told me that Abbott is “a globalist. He’s a tyrant. He’s a great deceiver.” And though she’s voted Republican in almost every primary and every general election since 1979, she’s voting for Hinojosa in November.
Several polls still show Hinojosa trailing by a couple of points, but three recent ones, including a New York Times/Siena poll released on Saturday, have her ahead. The polling aggregator Real Clear Politics now rates the race as a tossup, and last week Cook Political Report moved it from “likely” to “lean” Republican. Over the past week, national Democrats have started investing more heavily in the race: Gov. JB Pritzker of Illinois and the Democratic Governors Association each gave Hinojosa $1 million.
Part of that chance derives from Trump’s unpopularity and the country’s economic misery, which is particularly stark in Texas. Campaigning, Hinojosa talks about how the state has more people without health insurance than any other, and some of the nation’s highest rates of small-business bankruptcies. She describes blood plasma centers popping up in middle-class areas — she visited one next to a Sephora — as more people seek to sell their plasma to make ends meet.
But her surge can’t be attributed entirely to the economic environment: Hinojosa seems to be hitting her stride as a politician. She’s long had a talent for making people feel heard, but O’Rourke said she’s become dramatically better on the stump. “I campaigned with her in El Paso a few weeks ago, and I’ve never seen her speak so well,” he said.
Her message is simple: Life has gotten too hard for hard-working people in Texas. Schools are underfunded — hundreds have gone to four days a week — and new artificial intelligence initiatives are no substitute for a good teacher in the classroom. Data centers are both a blight and a symbol of Abbott’s misplaced priorities. . . . the governor doing the bidding of moneyed interests and leaving the people to fend for themselves,” Hinojosa told me.
It’s a platform, she insists, that can break through with those who in the past have felt alienated from the Democratic Party. “When I sit down with people who voted for Trump, with people who voted for Abbott, and hear them, and they hear me, there’s an opportunity for connection and alliance,” she said. Democrats have a chance, she insists, to move past the cultural battles that have kept them perennially on the defensive. “If we try to be post-culture wars, we can be post-culture wars,” she said. “I’ve experienced it. I’ve seen it.”
Of course, deep rifts over religion, race and gender can’t simply be wished away. But if Hinojosa can find a way to make them less salient, it could portend not just seismic change in Texas, but the beginning of a political realignment. If some fraction of socially conservative voters conclude that rapacious billionaires threaten them more than supercilious liberals, it would remake America’s political map.
In May, speaking to my colleague Lulu Garcia-Navarro, Tucker Carlson said that culture war issues — the issues on which he’d built much of his demagogic career — were becoming less important than matters of concentrated wealth and financial precarity. “Most of the debates about race, ethnicity, religion, to some extent immigration, are less resonant long-term than debates about economics,” he said. Hinojosa’s campaign is a bet that he was right.
She is, of course, far from the only Democrat running as a populist and seeking to persuade disaffected Trump supporters. Zohran Mamdani started his mayoral campaign by interviewing working-class Trump voters in Queens and the Bronx, and he won over a small but meaningful chunk of them.
Sure, Texas looks more promising for Democrats this year than it has in decades, with the party’s Senate candidate, James Talarico, maintaining a consistent lead over the Republican Ken Paxton. But Paxton is singularly sleazy and widely despised. As astonishing as a Talarico victory would be, Republicans could explain it away as the fault of a particularly bad candidate.
They won’t be able to do that if Hinojosa wins. Abbott has been elected governor of Texas three times by double-digit margins. If Hinojosa even comes close to beating him, it will be because the Republican coalition that Trump assembled is collapsing, and a new Democratic one is perhaps starting to take shape. “There are people who are responding to our message the same way they were responding to Trump’s message,” she said. “They want power. They want to feel like they’re in control of their lives again, and I think that they want to return to a time that feels like it makes sense again, where hard work pays off.”
A big part of the reason Hinojosa is pulling ahead is that Latinos, who swung toward Republicans in 2024, have soured on the party due in large part to Trump’s brutal mass deportation campaign. At a Spanish-language town hall last week, Hinojosa, whose mother is a Mexican immigrant, mentioned ICE’s fatal shooting of Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, who’d been in the country for 35 years. “They thought he was someone else, they killed him, and then they realized that he was only going to work,” she said. “When that’s happening, none of us are safe.”
But Hinojosa is also trying to chip away at Abbott’s — and Trump’s — white, rural base. No one thinks she’s going to win these voters outright; the goal is to lose them by less. “There’s definitely a backlash against Abbott over vouchers and over data centers in rural Texas,” said Suzanne Bellsnyder, who writes a newsletter called Texas Rural Reporter. “The question is, does that anger against Abbott translate into a vote for Gina?”
Bellsnyder is trying to make sure it does. A former field director for Abbott, she’s now working for Hinojosa’s campaign. “If I didn’t think she had a chance, I promise you, I wouldn’t be putting my entire Republican credentials on the line,” she told me.
[H]e was livid about Abbott’s relentless push for vouchers. “Our governor took billionaire money and then used it to beat Republicans that us Republicans elected,” he said. As he soured on Abbott, he’d also grown disillusioned with Trump and his flagrant, gluttonous corruption. “When you’ve lied to me enough,” said Clugston, “and sold us out for billionaires, I get to the point I’m done.”
Hinojosa’s inroads with the populist right might have been limited to those most committed to public schools, were it not for Abbott’s enthusiasm for data centers. The governor has aggressively sought tech investment in Texas; he’s offered billions in tax incentives to attract data centers and last year boasted that the state was “the epicenter of A.I. development.” Texas now has more in operation than any other state.
Many rural Texans who either live near these behemoths, or fear they will soon, detest them. Anger is so intense that Sid Miller, the state’s outgoing agriculture commissioner — he lost his primary after a series of scandals — told Rolling Stone that it could cost Abbott the election.
Still, he said, something is changing in Texas. A few weeks ago, Henson thought an Hinojosa victory was nearly impossible. Now he just thinks it’s unlikely. If only Talarico were to win, as he’s increasingly favored to do, “it’s going to be an earthquake,” said Henson. If Talarico and Hinojosa win, it will be a whole other order of magnitude. “People are feeling the ground shaking,” he said. “It’s just a matter of how big it is going to be.”
If it’s big enough, we’ll feel the reverberations from coast to coast. Conservatives triumphed when they were able to brand the Democratic Party as the stronghold of elites. Hinojosa thinks she can turn that association around, showing voters that Republicans represent heedless, exploitative oligarchs. “It’s 99 percent of us against like 15 billionaire dudes and the weak leadership that allows them to get away with whatever they want,” she said. If that argument can prevail in Texas, it can probably prevail most anywhere.
Thursday, October 08, 2026
Trump Has Alienated Voters for the G.O.P.
If Democrats make big gains in the midterm elections in four weeks, it may not only be because their most loyal voters come out in force, or because their candidates have converted Republican voters to their cause.
Instead, the Democrats’ dream blue wave could come from Republicans who sour on President Trump and stay home. It already has a name: the red undertow.
Across the country, signs are emerging of an enthusiasm gap between Democrats and Republicans, even among those who consider themselves likely to vote. A stretch of rural southwest Michigan — long a Republican stronghold — illustrates the point, with more signs for blueberries and eggs than for political candidates. Volunteers are not showing up to door-knock. And many voters say they are tuning this election out.
“People are just more focused on everyday life,” said Lindsay Kronemeyer, 35, a conservative Christian mother of two who works in the construction industry. “I don’t hear the chatter on the Republican side of ‘Trump this, Trump that.’ He’s just not there in my head anymore.”
The idea of the red undertow was introduced last month by the political analyst Charlie Cook, who argued that the Democratic brand was still underwater, but that this election was not about a rising Democratic tide. It was about a drowning Trump brand.
In its wake, Mr. Cook wrote, an undertow will “pull many Republicans under.” . . . . In nearly three dozen interviews in Western Michigan, a sense of fatigue was constant, and that feeling goes beyond that region.
“President Trump has been saying, ‘Vote as if I was on the ballot,’ and that’s exactly what I’m going to do — not vote,” said Brandon Tremaine, 24, a graduate student in Texas who voted for Mr. Trump in 2020. “You do not campaign on being the ticket of peace and start a war of choice that is directly hurting Americans here at home and gotten Americans killed overseas.”
Polls can be unreliable, and moods may be fleeting. Trump loyalists are also known for not taking the calls of polling outfits, and that may be overstating Democratic strengths.
The numbers aren’t drastically far apart. A New York Times/Siena University national poll from last month found that Democrats were more likely to say they were absolutely certain to vote than Republicans, 61 percent to 56 percent. While Democrats led Republicans nationally by seven percentage points among registered voters, that advantage rose to nine points among likely voters.
But in close races, a small gap could prove meaningful.
“People are tired,” Al Pscholka, a Republican and a former member of the Michigan House of Representatives, said of Mr. Trump. “The whole divider-in-chief thing, it’s gotten to the point where it’s just exhausting.”
The concern is showing in unlikely places. Representative Bill Huizenga, a Western Michigan Republican whose four House victories were all by comfortable margins, is in “the fight of his life” against a well-funded centrist Democrat from Kalamazoo named Sean McCann, said Rob Pocock, a retired Republican political consultant who has worked on campaigns in the region.
Nancy DeBoer, the local Republican state representative, also faces a serious fight against Joseph McClusky, a graduate of Hope College, a conservative Christian liberal arts college in Holland, Mich., who is openly gay.
“I would be shocked if Joseph wins, but I can’t believe he’s done as well as he has,” said Mr. Pocock, who teaches at Hope and had Mr. McClusky as a student. He said in Ottawa County, he was seeing Democratic yard signs in numbers he’d never seen before. . . . “I think there’s a shift in the party back toward, we need a little bit of the establishment folks,” Ms. Kronemeyer said. “They exist for a reason.”
If anybody should be enthusiastic about the election, it is Ms. Kronemeyer. She ran for a statehouse seat in 2022. She door-knocked for Mr. Trump in 2016 and 2020. But she said that when a friend asked her recently about the races in her area, she had to admit she hadn’t been following them closely. She lives in deep-red Allegan County, where “traditionally in election years, yard signs would be peppered everywhere,” she said. But the only signs she’d seen this year were for a judge, she said.
Now, Mr. Pasek said, Mr. Trump seems to have lost his way. He started a war when he said he wouldn’t, sending the price of gas through the roof. And he seems to talk more about ballrooms and arches than he does about how he will bring prices back down. “He’s losing touch with the American people,” Mr. Pasek said.
Mr. Pasek cited gas prices: “He says it’s chump change. No, it’s not! It’s killing the people.”
He has noticed someone living in a car in a parking lot when he drives into town, he said. He worried about his granddaughter, 28, a college graduate from Michigan State University, who is working three jobs — one full-time and two part-time — but can’t find a house she can afford.
Those misgivings are being felt at the local party level. Doug Koopman, a member of the Kent County Republican Party’s executive committee, said that it had been a struggle to get the foot soldiers of the midterm elections — volunteer door-knockers and canvassers — to pick up brochures to distribute door to door, leaving bags of them sitting around the party headquarters.
Even Republicans who are in politics say they are tired — worn out by the battles between pro-MAGA politicians and traditional Republicans. Bob Harrison, 76, a Republican county commissioner in Berrien County, where MAGA forces won control of the county G.O.P., said those forces took away the right to vote on party decisions from local elected officials like him.
“Does he really know what he’s doing?” Mr. Stewart said.
He would never vote for a Democrat; he feels bludgeoned by liberals online, he said. But he’s not sure he’ll vote for Republicans, either.
“I just spent $60 on $30 worth of groceries and am about to go fill up for $5 a gallon,” he said, carrying two bags of groceries to his car. “It feels like they’re stress-testing us.”
Wednesday, October 07, 2026
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