Dem
47
GOP
53
During the 2024 presidential campaign, Donald Trump's campaign manager, Susie Wiles, spent $65 million on variations of one ad. It was about how during her short-lived 2019 presidential campaign, Kamala Harris said she was fine with spending taxpayer money to allow prisoners to get sex-change operations. The tag line was: "Kamala is for they/them; President Trump is for you." Wiles is a smart operator and undoubtedly tested that ad nine ways to Sunday before spending that kind of money on it. Typically that would involve polling some city, running the ad there, then polling it again to see if anything changed.
The ad worked and possibly contributed to getting low-propensity voters (e.g., young Black and Latino men) to the polls, although that is hard to test. Naturally, Republicans thought they had found the holy grail and used it again in 2025. And... it flopped.
Both Winsome Earle-Sears in Virginia and Jack Ciattarelli in New Jersey made anti-trans ads a big part of their campaigns. Over half of Earle-Sears ads were about trans issues, like this one:
Of course, they both lost bigly. In the end, the two Republicans got virtually identical shares of the vote, 42.6% for Earle-Sears and 42.9% for Ciattarelli. That tells you two things: (1) candidate quality wasn't much of an issue, since Earle-Sears was clearly a weaker candidate than Ciattarelli and (2) both of them basically got the Republican votes in their states, and no others. The whole point of the anti-trans stuff is to peel off independents and even some Democrats who are really bothered by trans people in general, or by trans girls playing organized sports, or trans women in women's restrooms, or drag shows, or whatever. And please be clear, we understand that there are only a smattering of trans girls actually playing organized sports, that most trans women who use women's restrooms do not attract attention because they pass for assigned-female-at-birth women, and that the vast, vast majority of drag queens are not trans. Often, when it comes to trans, feelings don't care about your facts.
Both Republican gubernatorial candidates knew from surveys that something like 80% of the voters were on their side, so why did the issue fail them? We can think of three possible explanations. First, and most likely, is that that they didn't dig deeply enough. While the voters are anti-trans, to various degrees, this wasn't the top issue for them. It wasn't even in the top five. Things like the economy, health care, immigration, education, crime, taxes, and other items ranked way above trans issues, no matter who was being polled. That is not surprising; people pretty much always care more about these things than culture-wars stuff. That's doubly true when there is nervousness about things like the economy, health care, etc., which there clearly is right now.
The second possibility is something we've pointed out before: The bugaboo du jour only works for so long, and then a new one has to be found. There's a reason that Republicans today don't build their campaigns around gay marriage anymore—opposition to gay marriage is a minority position now, and the issue doesn't motivate very many voters who aren't already showing up to the polls and voting Republican. There's a reason that Donald Trump has moved on from his habit of making sure that every sentence has a noun, a verb, and a mention of MS-13. MS-13 wasn't moving the needle anymore. Maybe the anti-trans stuff is losing salience.
Third is that nearly any political framing has to be spot-on to work. Otherwise, the commercials and slogans and talking points basically become background noise. Wiles' "Harris is for they/them" shtick was clearly very compelling. But "Abigail Spanberger doesn't hate trans people enough" (see commercial above) doesn't have quite the same ring to it.
Still, Republicans are undaunted and planning to use anti-trans messaging again in 2026. The old ways die hard. Somehow, the Republicans are drunk on bigotry. Terry Schilling, president of the American Principles Project, said his group ran $2.5 million in ads in New Jersey and Virginia "to expose radical Democrats' support for gender insanity." He explained the lack of results by noting that they are solid blue territories. So, he is planning to try again against Roy Cooper in North Carolina and Sen. Jon Ossoff in Georgia.
However, the Global Strategy Group noted that when Democrats respond directly and early they can fend off the attacks by demonstrating their values and strength. Gov.-elect Abigail Spanberger ran this ad:
It talks about how she is a mom with three girls in public schools and how as a former law enforcement officer she went after child predators. It also talks about getting politics out of schools and her plans to make Virginia schools the best in the country. Rep. Sarah McBride (D-DE), who is trans and so knows this issue pretty well, said the Democrats' problem in 2024 was sticking their heads in the sand and ignoring the ads instead of confronting them head-on and responding directly. Undoubtedly, many Democrats will be scheduling meetings with McBride to learn how best to thread this particular needle. It might be ironic that McBride's election to the House could end up being a godsend to the Democrats. They now have a high-profile subject-matter expert to give them advice. (V)