While exit polls have indicated that inflation and an unpopular incumbent president both doomed Kamala Harris’ 107-day run for president, some Democrats are blaming their party’s embrace of transgender people for Harris’ loss.
Though several signs indicate that trans issues weren’t responsible for the election’s outcome, some pundits are urging Democrats to reconsider how they engage the issue rather than abandon trans rights altogether.
Republicans invested about $215 million into airing anti-trans TV ads that repeated claims about Democrats wanting “boys to play girls sports” and supporting taxpayer-funded gender-affirming surgeries for inmates. One ad — aired repeatedly during football games to reach male voters and suburban women — showed pictures of Harris next to a drag queen, a trans woman, and a nonbinary person; and ended with the tagline, “Kamala is for they/them. President Trump is for you.”
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Democrats largely avoided engaging with this issue. The Democratic National Convention didn’t have a transgender speaker and only mentioned trans issues once during a speech by Human Rights Campaign (HRC) President Kelley Robinson. In one of her first TV interviews, Harris briefly said that the Constitution requires the government to provide medically necessary care, including gender-affirming care, to all inmates.
Former President Bill Clinton reportedly advised Harris’ campaign to respond more forcefully to the ads, but the campaign said it felt that the ads weren’t having any effect. However, one poll showed about 64% of voters said they viewed anti-trans attack ads against Harris, and Future Forward (a pro-Harris super PAC), found that Trump’s ad against Harris “shifted the race 2.7 percentage points in Mr. Trump’s favor after viewers watched it.”
Since the election, numerous Democrats and pundits have claimed that trans issues contributed to Democrats’ Election Night losses. Gilberto Hinojosa, the Texas Democratic Party’s chair for the last 12 years, said that Democrats lost because they supported trans rights and other cultural issues that a “bulk of our population does not support.” Hinojosa later apologized, and on Friday, he resigned, citing Democrats’ “devastating defeats up and down the ballot.”
Reps. Tom Suozzi (D-NY) and Seth Moulton (D-MA) both recently said that Democrats shouldn’t be defending “biological boys… playing in girls’ sports.” Moulton’s campaign manager and political committee director resigned after Moulton’s comment, but Moulton has doubled down, telling CNN, that he “may not have used exactly the right words” but was “speaking authentically as a parent about one of many issues where Democrats are just out of touch with the majority of Americans.”
“We try to cancel people rather than actually having debates about issues that Americans care about,” he said.
Joe Scarborough, host of MSNBC’s Morning Joe news talk program, said the anti-trans ads “had a bigger impact than any ad that ran,” and said that the issue has even alienated Democratic voters who have daughters playing sports and are afraid of publicly discussing trans athletes for fear of being “canceled” for saying something “politically incorrect.”
Indeed, the attacks have occurred in a political climate that has seen increasing right-wing-led reactions against trans people: 26 states have laws banning trans athletes in sports and gender-affirming care for trans youth. Over the last two years, anti-trans activists have recently launched media campaigns against Bud Light, competitive trans swimmer Lia Thomas, Algerian pro boxer Imane Khelif, and Planet Fitness.
Despite this, the Human Rights Campaign has repeatedly said that anti-trans ads are a waste of money because polls showed that only 4% of voters listed trans issues as among their primary concerns. Other polls have shown that most Americans oppose anti-trans discrimination and political candidates.
Nonetheless, “One of the mysteries of this election is how the Democrats approached polling day with a set of policies on gender identity that they were neither proud to champion — nor prepared to disown.” Atlantic writer Helen Lewis said in a recent column, adding that “Biden’s administration has long pushed the new orthodoxy on gender, without ever really explaining to the American people why it matters—or, more crucially, what it actually involves.”
Lewis notes that President Joe Biden’s administration officials have advocated for removing lower age limits for gender surgeries for minors; Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson refused to define what a woman is during her Senate confirmation hearing, saying, “I’m not a biologist”; Biden’s Department of Education has said schools potentially violate Title IX when they don’t allow trans athletes to compete on teams matching their gender identity.
“Athletes who have gone through male puberty are typically stronger and faster than biological females,” Lewis wrote. “Rather than contend with that fact, many on the left have retreated to a comfort zone of claiming that opposition to trans women in women’s sports is driven principally by transphobia,” even going so far to accuse others of using “slurs” if people misgender trans athletes in conversations about the issue.
She said the anti-trans ads “tapped into a larger concern about Democrats: that they were elitists who ruled by fiat, declined to defend their unpopular positions, and treated skeptics as bigots. Gender might not have been high on voters’ list of concerns, but immigration and the border were—and all the same criticisms of Democratic messaging apply to those subjects, too.”
Naturally, trans advocates have been telling Democrats not to blame trans people for the election’s results.
“Please do not blame trans issues or trans people for why we lost,” Sam Alleman, the Harris campaign’s LGBTQ-engagement director, wrote on X. “Trans folks have been and are going to be a primary target of Project 2025 and need us to have their backs now more than ever.”
Out Rep. Becca Balint (D-VT) said, “No, we’re not going to abandon our support of all Americans, including our trans friends and neighbors and family members. Absolutely not.” Instead, Balint said that Democrats should work on strengthening their coalition of voters.
Brad Pritchett, the interim chief executive of LGBTQ+ advocacy group Equality Texas, cautioned, “This is something that Democrats need to stop and remember what their values are. We live and run campaigns by the values we hold dear.”
He also noted that NBC News exit polls showed that 86% of LGBTQ+ voters supported Harris and that Democrats shouldn’t be “alienating” some of their most loyal supporters.
Echoing Balint’s comment, Sarah Kate Ellis, president and CEO of GLAAD, said, “Trans people and other marginalized communities were unwillingly dragged into a relentless, baseless smear campaign from the right wing throughout this election. Mainstream media should be focusing on the facts: this was an immoral onslaught against a small group of people who just want to be themselves and live safely… The inaccurate fear tactics became a distraction that allowed candidates to dodge accountability for real issues on the minds of voters like economic policies, abortion access, and healthcare.”
Times columnist Philip Elliott wrote that Democrats who are blaming trans issues for Democrats’ election losses are treating trans people as a “scapegoat,” adding, “Rather than ask why Democrats didn’t do more to explain that standing up for trans kids is just the right thing to do, these politicians are trying to absolve their compatriots’ silence.”
MSNBC columnist Hayes Brown noted that Democrats only spent $9 million to refute the GOP’s anti-trans attacks, rebuffing the idea that Democrats lost for embracing trans issues too tightly. Brown noted that numerous trans and nonbinary candidates won historic races on Election Day, rebuffing the idea that voters are transphobic.
Brown also noted that LGBTQ+ crisis services had a major spike in calls since Election Day and that Republicans under President-elect Trump will herald a new wave of anti-trans attacks and a rollback of Biden’s pro-trans protections.
This doesn’t mean that Democrats need to run from the issue or continue to discuss it in terms of “boys playing girls’ sports.”
As an example of how Democratic candidates could address the issue head-on, trans journalist Erin Reed pointed to Jeff Jackson, a Democrat who recently won his race to become North Carolina’s next attorney general, as an example of how to effectively counter anti-trans messaging: Stand up for the dignity and inclusion of all people, tell Republicans to stop trying to regulate people’s personal medical decisions, and hammer the poor records of their political opponents while acknowledging voters’ economic concerns.
You want to see how you message transgender issues and anti-trans attack ads?
Look no further than Jeff Jackson, running for AG of North Carolina.
