Democrats are bickering over the lack of response to transgender messaging from Republicans during the campaign as the GOP repeatedly went after Vice President Kamala Harris with ads attacking her on the issue that went unanswered by Democrats, leaving her defenseless.
As he campaigned throughout the fall, President-elect Donald Trump rolled out a series of ads hitting Harris on supporting transgender operations for prison inmates, including illegal immigrants. The move to portray her as an out-of-touch progressive unable to relate to voters’ concerns on everyday matters successfully swung voters who watched the ads toward him by 2 points.
The Harris campaign made the strategic decision not to respond to Trump’s messaging directly, a move that has some Democrats raging, according to a report from the New York Times.
“Malpractice was committed by that campaign,” said former Democratic Pennsylvania Gov. Ed Rendell, who served as chairman of the Democratic National Committee at the turn of the century.
Rendell said he made calls to senior advisers on the Harris campaign, requesting that they respond to Trump’s transgender ad campaign, but his requests fell on deaf ears.
“They saw the ad, they knew it was being bought in heavy quantities,” he reflected. “Where were they? What were they thinking?”
Other Democrats said they never heard about the ad “anywhere on the campaign trail,” according to Rep. Mark Pocan (D-WI), who said pinning the blame on transgender issues was “the ultimate misdirection.”
One of the primary ads used by the Trump campaign to target Harris on transgender issues played into voters’ economic concerns.
As a headline flashed across the screen stating that “Trump tax cuts benefited middle, working-class,” a narrator said: “Kamala is for they/them. President Trump is for you.”
Trump allies poured millions of dollars over the course of the campaign on the 30-second ad, alongside similar pitches, sparking internal debate from the vice president’s campaign about how to respond. But Meg Schwenzfeier, the chief analytics officer for the Harris campaign, said this week that senior advisers decided against directly responding to Trump’s messaging in favor of pivoting to talking about the economy.
“In all of our quantitative and qualitative research on this ad, our best-testing responses pivoted to the economy,” Schwenzfeier commented. “These responses not only neutralized the attack but actually moved people towards us — because they showed voters that the vice president did care about you.”
In addition to deciding not to address spot-on her past support for funding sex changes for prisoners, Harris declined to back off from supporting the policy during a rare high-profile interview with Fox News’s Bret Baier in the final weeks of her campaign.
“I will follow the law,” the vice president said, reiterating the same words after Baier repeatedly pressed her on whether she still supported taxpayer-funded transgender operations for inmates, including illegal immigrants.
When Harris tapped Gov. Tim Walz (D-MN) to be her vice presidential running mate, she gave Republicans further fodder for fire. The Minnesota Democrat holds progressive positions on transgender policies, issuing an executive order in 2023 allowing children to obtain transgender operations and undergo sterilizing hormone treatments. The same year, Walz signed into law another piece of legislation giving state courts temporary emergency jurisdiction to remove children from their parent or guardian if they are unable to access “gender-affirming care,” including transgender operations, puberty blockers, and breast removal surgeries.
Calling Walz a “radical-left man that … has positions that are not even possible to believe they exist,” Trump derided the governor for being “heavy into the transgender world” during an August press conference at Mar-a-Lago.
After Harris declined to respond with her own barrage of campaign ads to Trump’s attacks and subsequently lost the election, Democrats unloaded.
“I think we need to improve our messaging. I got clobbered on all the transgender messaging in my district, and it was very painful,” Rep. Vicente Gonzalez (D-TX) told the Hill.
A DNC member from Florida offered a similar assessment, saying, “I don’t want to be the freak show party, like they have branded us.”
“You know, when you’re a mom with three kids, and you live in middle America and you’re just not really into politics, and you see these ads that scare the bejesus out of you, you’re like, ‘I know Trump’s weird or whatever, but I would rather his weirdness that doesn’t affect my kids,’” the member told Politico this week.
Out of the transgender battle came endless Republican attacks on Harris’s support for allowing transgender women to play in women’s sports. The Biden-Harris administration’s change to Title IX rules allowing biological men to compete against women infuriated Republican females, including Riley Gaines, an NCAA competitor for the University of Kentucky who was ruled to have lost to a transgender woman, Lia Thomas, during a 2022 competition.
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Trump often brought up transgender competition in women’s sports on the campaign trail. He argued that the policy undermined a level playing field for female athletes, and momentum against the transgender policy picked up in downballot races, including against Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-OH).
The Republican-led Senate Leadership Fund poured over $15 million into ad campaigns targeting Brown for supporting sex changes for minors and transgender competition in women’s sports. Despite rebuffing the claims, Brown lost his race to a Trump-backed Republican challenger, ending his 50-year political career.