MANASSAS, Virginia — Sometimes in politics, the other side is doing something so bad it makes you crazy to even talk about it.
Let’s call it “immunity by insanity.”
Democrats’ sweep in Virginia‘s 2025 elections is a prime example. Democrats were stuck with a radical and unpopular adherence to gender ideology, and Republicans pointed out their extremism and the harms of their policies. But this just made the Republicans sound nuts.
As a result, Republicans backed off from the matter late in the campaign.
Here are some of the basics of Virginia Democrats’ gender policies:
A repeat Tier-1 sex offender named Richard Cox was regularly allowed into female high-school and local rec center locker rooms in northern Virginia, where he leered at and exposed himself to women and girls. This happened not because of oversights by staff, but because of the explicit, intentional policies of Democrats at the county and state level.
Gov.-elect Abigail Spanberger (D-VA) didn’t create these policies, but her party did, and she has repeatedly pledged and demonstrated allegiance to the ideology behind them. For instance, she voted for a bill to make it a federal crime to discriminate on the basis of gender identity.
That is, she believes Cox is a woman, and that anyone who would deny this, or deny his entry in female locker rooms, is guilty of bigotry and discrimination. She believes the people who objected to Cox entering female locker rooms are the criminals.
And that’s not the extent of Virginia Democrats’ gender insanity.
Loudoun County schools suspended two boys who expressed their discomfort with a girl (who identified as a boy) in the boys bathroom.
A few years ago, the same school district covered up a sexual assault in school because the assaulter entered a girls bathroom wearing a skirt, and so it would have triggered an uncomfortable debate over transgender bathroom policy. The father of the victim became irate at the cover-up and was, for his righteous anger, turned by Democrats and the media into a terrorist.
Democrats in the state legislature pushed a bill to declare it child abuse if a parent doesn’t affirm their child’s new identity. And the sponsor of that bill was on the ballot.
Throw in the growing problem of boys playing in and winning at girls sports, and their adherence to gender ideology ought to be a big negative for Democrats. One Democratic voter I spoke to in McLean, Virginia, a Catholic woman in her 70s named Linda, said of gender ideology in northern Virginia schools, “That’s a real problem. I’m just glad my kids are grown adults and out of the school system.”
She continued, “It’s unimaginable … I feel sorry for all the parents today, really, with this transgender stuff.”
And yet she voted for the entire Democratic ticket, adding that she didn’t really know where the candidates stood on the topic.
Most Virginia voters, 51 %, told pollsters that the transgender agenda has gone too far.
Every Republican voter I interviewed on or just before Election Day mentioned transgender matters as their very first area of concern. Notably, the parents were typically indirect, or even apologetic about it. “Issues with the schools” was the euphemism (or code word) some parents used.
That same reticence showed up among the GOP candidates in the home stretch. In her final campaign appearance here in the exurbs of Washington, D.C., the Republican nominee for governor, Lt. Gov. Winsome Earle-Sears, didn’t bring up the topic at all — even after her campaign focused on it earlier in the fall.
Clearly, the polling showed her that she should drop the topic.
That may sound counterintuitive, considering that most voters agreed with her. But there’s a consistent rule of politics behind it: Whoever seems obsessed with social matters, on either side, loses.
The other persistent dynamic at play is “immunity by insanity.”
When you describe it accurately, that Cox exposed himself in high school girls locker rooms because Democrats’ policies gave him the right to be there, you sound crazy. When you say Democrats were pushing to take daughters away from their parents if they wouldn’t affirm their daughters’ new identities as boys, then you sound crazy.
Democrats, of course, didn’t talk about gender ideology on the campaign trail. They even hid and kept a low profile for their transgender lawmaker, Danica Roem. Democrats felt they didn’t have to answer the accusations and could just avoid the matter altogether.
So Republicans in the end stopped saying these things.
Democrats have an analogous problem when it comes to President Donald Trump‘s corruption.
Trump is making hundreds of millions off of meme coins, literally worthless digital “tokens,” and he just pardoned a crypto billionaire, yet says he doesn’t remember doing it. This would be the biggest presidential scandal in most years, but Democrats have been unable to make any of his crypto behavior stick.
Virginia Republicans realized in the final days that even though they had the public on their side, they couldn’t harp on the matter.
A year ago, the Trump campaign faced a similar problem. When Trump said in a debate that former Vice President Kamala Harris favored using taxpayer dollars to fund sex-change operations for transgender prisoners, the liberal media erupted in laughter, as if the charge was insane.
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The charge was not insane. But the GOP knew how to hit the matter: an ad showing the accusation coming from the mouths of others, including Harris’s.
It’s an advantage both Trump and many Democrats have: Their actions and positions are so crazy that it’s hard to attack them without sounding insane.