Republican Railroad Commission candidate Bo French says he never agreed to debate Democratic state Rep. Jon Rosenthal in Dallas on Thursday, flatly denying an account from the event's organizers that both campaigns had settled on a date weeks ago. The dispute means voters in one of Texas's most closely watched down-ballot races will not get to see the candidates share a stage before early voting wraps up, since the Dallas forum was billed as the only public event where voters would hear from statewide candidates together.
French told the Texas Tribune that both the Dallas Press Club and Rosenthal were lying about an agreed debate, saying he first learned of the supposed arrangement only after Rosenthal publicly claimed the two sides had a deal. French said his campaign never contacted Rosenthal's campaign at all, and argued that any such conversation would show up in the press club's call log — a log the organization has not been able to produce. He also said he saw no need to correct the public record earlier because, in his view, Rosenthal's alleged misstatements should have spoken for themselves.
Rosenthal, for his part, said in September that he and French had agreed to debate in Dallas. Carol Donovan, who organizes the Dallas Press Club's debates, said her personal notes showed both candidates were available on October 22, and that the press club had told Rosenthal's campaign on September 15 that French was open beginning the week of October 22. The press club told the Tribune it had engaged both candidates to settle on the night of October 22 but acknowledged it has no written record of that conversation. Donovan added that her attempts to reach French to confirm the debate went unanswered.
A Podcast Taping Replaces the Debate
With no debate materializing, the Dallas Press Club will instead host a podcast recording with Rosenthal alone on Thursday, moderated by Jeff Crilley, president and chief executive of Real News Public Relations. Rosenthal, an oilfield engineer and four-term legislator, plans to travel to Dallas for the taping regardless of French's absence. The Texas Railroad Commission's board has three members, and the race has attracted attention.
The scheduling fight lands amid a broader pattern of French clashing with party leaders and avoiding scrutiny. Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick asked French to resign as head of the Tarrant County GOP after French posted a poll asking whether Jews or Muslims posed a bigger threat to America, a post that also drew condemnation from Fort Worth Mayor Mattie Parker, according to KERA. French apologized at the time but refused to step down, claiming respondents had misunderstood his intent. More recently, French posted a message targeting University of Texas at Austin students at a Longhorns game, feeding into a wider backlash from within his own party.
Republican Defections Pile Up
That backlash has reached the upper ranks of Texas Republican politics. U.S. Senator John Cornyn said he would not vote for French and left open whether he would back Rosenthal instead, branding French “an embarrassment to the Republican Party” and warning, per the Texas Tribune, that French's rhetoric threatened to drag down the broader GOP ticket. Longtime Republican strategist Karl Rove went further, writing in a Wall Street Journal column that “the GOP's stables need a cleaning” as he endorsed Rosenthal — only the second Democrat he has backed in his career, after Bob Bullock in 1994, according to the Houston Chronicle. Governor Greg Abbott had also opposed French during the primary runoff, warning at a campaign stop that French's platform would “wreck the miracle” of Texas oil and gas production, though some high-ranking Republicans, including Cornyn, have said they would not vote for French.
French defeated incumbent Commissioner Jim Wright in the Republican primary, according to Ballotpedia. Rosenthal has represented Houston's District 135 for four terms since 2018 and spent more than two decades as a mechanical engineer in subsea oilfield operations before entering politics, according to Mother Jones, giving him a technical background that contrasts with French's private-equity career.
Substance Behind the Spectacle
Beyond the personal feuding, the candidates offer sharply different visions for an agency that, despite its name, no longer regulates railroads at all — it ceded that authority to the Texas Department of Transportation back in 2005 and now oversees oil and gas production, pipeline safety, natural gas utilities, and surface coal mining, per Texas Scorecard. Rosenthal has proposed strict weatherization standards for natural gas infrastructure and higher industry fees to remediate abandoned wells, while French has called for reducing industry regulations, eliminating diversity-based state contracting, and curbing foreign influence in state energy operations, according to Texas Public Radio.
The policy stakes are matched by unusually tight polling for a statewide Texas race. An October University of Texas and Texas Politics Project survey showed Rosenthal leading French by one point, within a 3.34-point margin of error, as Hoodline previously reported. Still, Democrats have not won a statewide office in Texas since 1994 and have not held a Railroad Commission seat since former U.S. Senator Bob Krueger's term ended in 1990, a drought that leaves Rosenthal facing a steep historical climb even as the debate dispute keeps French's campaign in an unflattering spotlight heading into the final stretch before early voting.
