Defeating They/Them

Why did Republicans lose in 2022? We covered this at length in our report, The Failed Red Wave: Lessons from the GOP’s 2022 Letdown:

Ultimately, Republicans left votes on the table by refusing to run campaign ads exposing the Democrats’ extremism on social issues. To win in 2024, we argued, the Republican Party would need to learn to stop worrying and love the culture war.

And they did.

It was on September 10 that the Trump message on transgender issues first grabbed national attention. There, in his first and only debate with Harris, Trump attacked the vice president for supporting taxpayer-funded sex change surgeries for prisoners, including illegal aliens. Commentators were alarmed by the claim, and even more alarmed by the subsequent factchecks showing that it was true. A little more than a week later, the Trump campaign began airing ads on the issue:

As The Wall Street Journal reported, “[the Trump campaign’s] ads until then had focused on economic pressures and portraying Harris as overly liberal on crime and immigration. But polling showed the transgender topic was hitting home. Ads were tested with online focus groups and the reception was huge, elevating the issue above others.”

Trump began bringing up transgender issues more prominently in his speeches and interviews, as well as in his ads. In mid-October, some 40 percent of the campaign’s ads focused on issues of “gender identity” according to the Wesleyan Media Project, more than on immigration, the economy, or jobs.

The focus on transgender issues continued through the final days of the campaign. Women’s sports featured prominently in the campaign’s final ad, an all-out assault on woke: under the Biden-Harris administration “men could beat up women and win medals, but there was no prize for the guy who got up every day to do his job.” And Trump raised similar issues during his final rally: “[Democrats] have horrible policy. [...] They can have transgender operations at any age, any time you want. They can be pushing men playing in women's sports. Because [Kamala]’s just a vessel, and Joe Biden was just a vessel.

It wasn’t just in the presidential race either. In late October, Axios reported that Senate Republicans and groups supporting them had spent “over $77 million on ads about transgender issues in races in 10 states, according to AdImpact data as of Oct. 24. [...] The Mitch McConnell-linked Senate Leadership Fund has spent $32 million in Ohio alone, hitting incumbent Democratic Sen. Sherrod Brown on voting for ‘allowing trans biological men in girls locker rooms’ and ‘sex change surgery for kids.’”

According to our own analysis of the AdImpact data, serious Republican ad campaigns about transgender issues on broadcast TV were already underway before the presidential debate in Texas, Montana, Ohio, and Pennsylvania. In late September to early October, a similar campaign began in Wisconsin. More began throughout October in Michigan (by 10/17), Nevada (10/23) and very late (10/30) in Arizona.

In early October, The New York Times reported that Democrat strategists were putting on a brave face in public, but privately “conced[ing] that the transgender attacks are taking a toll in some races. The most aired Trump ad in recent weeks was rated as one of his campaign’s more effective in September in some Democratic testing, according to results reviewed by The Times.”

Left-wing activists who ran randomized controlled trials to study the message’s effect found the first Trump ad alone moved voters towards Trump by somewhere between 1.3 and 2.7 points. As a reminder, Trump won Wisconsin by 0.9 points, Michigan by 1.4, the national popular vote by 1.5, Pennsylvania by 1.7, and Georgia by 2.2.

Our own post-election polling found that people remembered the message and that it moved them towards Trump. In an APP-commissioned survey conducted by Cygnal, we asked voters and non-voters whether they had heard about Harris supporting a number of policies, and then asked whether hearing it had made them more likely to vote for Trump, made them more likely to vote for Harris, or made no difference. In every case, the messages proved beneficial to Trump, often by significant margins.

Republican strategists have suggested in the past that transgender issues might work to fire up the base but would be useless for persuasion in a general election. This couldn’t be further from the truth. According to reporting from The Wall Street Journal, the Trump messages worked especially well with persuadable voters, suburban women, and Hispanic men. And data released since the election suggests that these issues were some of the most crucial for swing voters this election.

An analysis from Blueprint 2024, a Democratic firm, tested which arguments against voting for Harris were most compelling to voters.

The report found that the third most compelling reason to voters as a whole was essentially the same message as the one in Trump’s “they/them” ad campaign: “Kamala Harris is focused more on cultural issues like transgender issues rather than helping the middle class.” Even more remarkably, they found that this argument ranked first overall among swing voters, performing even better than messages about immigration (“Too many immigrants illegally crossed the border under the Biden-Harris administration”) or inflation (“Inflation was too high under the Biden-Harris administration”).

These were two of the top five differences between Trump and Harris swing voters in the poll — a 43-point and 48-point split, respectively. The only bigger differences between these groups were whether they knew Harris’s position on letting criminal illegal aliens stay in the country (49 points), on defunding the police (53 points), or on allowing abortion up until the day of birth (53 points).

Many on the left, and some on the right, have insinuated that the only reason the ads worked was because it showed Harris’s misplaced priorities and not because of the actual content of her policies.

Some have previously suggested, likewise, that if a Republican runs too many attack ads on gender issues, voters will punish them for focusing on the “culture war” rather than on the real “kitchen table issues” voters care about. Neither of these claims are true.

First of all, Republican attacks really did hurt the Democrats. Despite the fact that Trump’s campaign, and not Harris’s, ran ads on transgender issues, it was Harris who got the blame. In late October, 41 percent of registered voters thought that Harris was focusing too much on transgender issues, compared to 26 percent who said the same of Trump.

As Yahoo! News put it:

Secondly, the attacks worked because Harris was saying something really unpopular. Although in polling many more voters chose the economy as their top priority rather than transgender issues, it would be a mistake to assume from this that nobody should spend time attacking the Democrats’ extremism. If you had a Democrat on record supporting nuclear war, for example, you wouldn’t hold off on an attack just because only four percent of voters chose foreign policy as their top issue.

The misunderstanding stems from the fact that political elites still do not recognize exactly how much the general public hates the Democratic position on transgenderism — from women’s sports, to sex-change procedures for minors, to bathrooms and locker rooms, to public indoctrination in middle school, and so on.

Democrats know that this Trump message works, but they can’t do anything about it. When they saw how effective the Trump ads were, the Harris campaign tested a number of response ads. None of them worked. Over “sharp internal debate,” they decided to drop the ads and pivot to the economy instead.

The Wall Street Journal reported the fruits of that decision: “Harris had an opening to address one of those ads, which focused on her support for taxpayer-funded transgender surgeries for federal inmates, during her combative Fox News interview in mid-October.

But Harris ended up dismissing the importance of voters’ concerns on the issue. ‘As it relates to the biggest issues that affect the American people, it’s really quite remote,’ Harris said in the interview.”

The decision to avoid the issue was criticized by activists and Democrat elites at the time. They believed that Harris’s record on gender issues was already too moderate, and that she should have leaned in further.

If Republicans want to continue to exploit this weakness to win more elections in the future, they will certainly have the opportunity. There is no reason to be scared of this issue now — it’s probably what earned them a trifecta. House and Senate leadership should confidently call votes on a number of transgender issues, including protecting women’s sports and women’s private spaces, banning sex changes for kids, and defunding any and all taxpayer funding from going toward the predatory transgender industry. In fact, it would be political malpractice not to.