With just four weeks until the election, Donald J. Trump and Republican candidates across the country are putting transgender issues at the center of their campaigns, and are making sure to support transgender women and girls in sports and taxpayer funding. It takes advantage of concerns about gender reassignment in prisons.
Since early August, Republicans have increased TV ads on these topics in more than a dozen states in some of the most competitive races in the country, according to a New York Times analysis of ad data compiled by AdImpact. It has spent more than $65 million.
The flood of ads in the House, Senate and White House races is fueling cultural divisions and portraying Democrats as outside the mainstream. These are signs that Republican strategists believe they have found a powerful third leg to send their message in 2024, in addition to the mainstays of inflation and immigration.
Republicans are returning to a largely unsuccessful message they tried in the 2022 midterm elections to motivate their base and limit losses from female voters who resent the party’s stance on abortion.
Trump’s most aired ad in recent weeks about Vice President Kamala Harris ends with the tagline: President Trump is on your side. ”
In Ohio, since early September, all ads about Sen. Sherrod Brown from the leading Senate Republican super PAC have focused on transgender people, including accusing her of “allowing biologically transgender men in women’s sports.” It touches on the topic. Brown is one of the most vulnerable Democratic incumbents in the nation.
In Montana, Sen. Jon Tester, another at-risk Democrat seeking re-election, has passed similar language regarding transgender women on sports, bathrooms, etc., as Republicans accuse him of being too liberal for the Republican-majority state. An advertisement for the book was published.
“This is one of the issues that Democrats are furthest from the center of the country,” said Republican ad production company Brad Todd, who has produced commercials about transgender issues for multiple campaigns this year. “They’re doing something completely illogical to appease a very radical minority at their core.”
Republicans acknowledge that relatively few transgender athletes compete in youth sports. But they said highlighting Democratic politicians’ reluctance to break with the party’s progressive wing on this issue is a powerful tool to paint members as either liberal or extreme.
Up or down the polls, Democratic candidates have largely tried to ignore this onslaught, preferring to pivot to more favorable policy areas such as abortion rather than get drawn into a public debate about transgender issues. I’m here.
But Democratic strategists privately acknowledge that attacks on transgender people have taken a heavy toll on some races. Trump’s most-aired ads in recent weeks were rated more effective among Trump campaign ads in some Democratic tests in September, according to a Times review.
Kelly Robinson, president of the Human Rights Campaign, one of the nation’s leading LGBTQ advocacy groups, said the Republican Party’s attempts to use transgender people as political leverage could lead to major elections in 2022 and 2023. She said it had failed and predicted it would fail again in 2024.
“This shows the Republican Party is in a desperate situation right now,” Robinson said. “Instead of being clear on how to improve our economy and make our schools safer, they are focused on sowing fear and confusion.”
Trump’s attack on what he calls “transgender insanity” has arguably drawn some of the loudest applause at his rallies. But now Mr. Trump has shifted significant resources to take that message far beyond his most ardent fans.
In the past three weeks, Trump’s campaign alone has spent more than $15.5 million on two TV ads, including Harris’s 2019 policy to “ensure gender access for all transgender inmates in prisons.” It resurfaced comments expressing support for . -Affirm surgery.
Chris Lacivita, one of Trump’s two campaign managers, said what made the commercial so effective was the use of Harris’ own words. “There’s no need for hyperbole,” he said. “It’s her.”
In a 2019 interview, Harris said she supported gender reassignment surgery for state prison inmates, and in an American Civil Liberties Union survey from the same year, she said she supported gender reassignment surgery for federal prison inmates and detained immigrants. expressed support for diversion care.
“She wants to do transgender surgery on illegal aliens in prison,” Trump said during a debate last month.
Harris’ campaign declined to comment.
Transgender-focused ads are running in key Senate races in states such as Montana, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Texas and Wisconsin. Many are from the Senate Leadership Fund, a super PAC affiliated with the top Senate Republican, Sen. Mitch McConnell of Kentucky.
Most Republican ads don’t criticize the transgender community in general. Instead, we’re giving transgender women and girls in sports, sharing locker rooms for transgender women, using taxpayer funds for gender reassignment surgery for people in prison, and accessing transition services for minors. , focuses on specific wedge incidents. Puberty blocker.
Lee Finke, Minnesota’s first transgender lawmaker and executive director of the Queer Equity Institute, said the attacks are more about emotion than evidence, and the narrow focus can make them especially difficult to deal with. He said that there is a sex.
“There’s no way the data shows transgender inclusion is in any way a threat,” Finke, a Democrat, said, adding, “This is really an argument based on impulses that someone might feel.” Ta. It’s difficult to argue with someone’s feelings. ”
Republican strategists say the focus on transgender women and girls in sports could be particularly effective with a key group of voters the party has gained significant support from in recent years: college-educated suburban women. He said it was spot on.
“One of the things we’re seeing in focus groups is that mothers are clearly furious about this issue,” said Jim McLaughlin, a Republican pollster who works for Trump and other Republican campaigns. . “It’s a question of fairness. They don’t want their daughters to lose their scholarships, and they don’t want their daughters to get hurt.”
These are some of the recurring themes in advertising.
“That’s wrong,” one mother said in a Wisconsin Republican ad.
“It’s unfair and dangerous,” the grandfather said in an Ohio Republican ad.
“Our women’s sports are under attack,” another mother from Montana said in the ad.
The Trump campaign has frequently run transgender ads during football games in recent weeks, according to people familiar with the ad-buying strategy. Popular radio host Charlamagne Tha God said on her show “The Breakfast Club” last week that the transgender commercial was particularly memorable because of the time it aired.
“I don’t know if it was the football background, but when I heard the narrator say, “Kamala supports taxpayer-funded gender reassignment of prisoners,” I heard that line. I was like, “Oh no, no, that’s not happening.” I want my tax dollars to be used for that,” he said. “That ad was effective.”
It helped that Republicans had the high-profile example of transgender athletes, particularly swimmer Leah Thomas, who in 2022 became the first transgender athlete to win an NCAA Division I title.
One of Thomas’ past competitors, Riley Gaines, narrated ads in this year’s Senate races in Missouri and Tennessee.
“My political awakening has led me to confront men,” Gaines said in the Tennessee ad.
A 2023 Gallup poll found that only 26% of Americans think transgender athletes should be able to play on sports teams that match their gender identity, down from two years ago.
At the same time, a majority of Americans believe that society should accept transgender people as the gender they identify with, including in five presidential battleground states polled by The New York Times and Siena College: Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, and North Carolina. Opinion polls regularly show that they think so. and Wisconsin.
The same was true in Ohio, where 54% of voters agreed, but no one has faced a more relentless focus on the issue than Mr. Brown.
Brown’s campaign has been targeted by an estimated $37 million in attacks on transgender issues since Labor Day, including all ads from the Senate Leadership Fund. Brown’s spokesman, Reeves Oyster, said the senator believes decisions about sports participation should be made by local school districts, individual sports leagues and the state sports commission, as opposed to the state’s Republican governor, Mike DeWine. He said he agreed with the opinion.
In the presidential race, a pro-Trump super PAC began repeating a campaign commercial with its own ads over the weekend, calling Harris a “crazy liberal,” showing the same clip about prisoner surgeries, and ending with the same content. It ended with that. Catchphrase “They/Them”. The ad featured an image of Queer Eye star Jonathan Van Ness wearing a dress. Van Ness said he identifies as non-binary.
“Going after famous celebrity stars who have been in our lives for years and whom people love and worship doesn’t seem like the right strategy to win people’s hearts,” said Robinson of the Human Rights Campaign. .
Ms. Harris met with Ms. Van Ness and the “Queer Eye” cast in July. An image from that meeting was featured in a recent ad by the American Principles Project, a social conservative advocacy group. Terry Schilling, the group’s president, said in more than a dozen focus groups the group conducted last year that when issues of minors and gender identity were brought up, liberal women were less likely to be treated as such than other issues. He said that it was found that he felt pleasure.
Schilling said the most effective ads his group ran in 2024 focused on Harris and her previous statements on transgender issues, and when shown to viewers online, the most effective ads were those that focused on Harris and her previous statements on transgender issues. He said the second ad completion rate was 91 percent, or 91 percent. Percent of viewers watched to the end but did not click on the “Skip Ad” option.
“This is a place where Republicans can increase their numbers, make Democrats look extreme, and reach their base,” Schilling said. “It’s killing three birds with one stone.”
Jeremy W. Peters contributed reporting.
