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Republican candidates across the U.S. spent over $65 million on anti-transgender campaign ads since August, as the party once again attempts to make transphobia a winning message.
GOP campaigns in more than a dozen states have poured tens of millions of dollars into anti-trans ads over the past two and half months, according to an analysis this week in the New York Times. The most prominent are from the Trump presidential campaign itself, which has aired its own such ads during highly-watched NFL, college football, and MLB playoff games in recent weeks. Those ads — on which the campaign has spent $15.5 million in the last three weeks, according to the Times — carry Trump’s new line of attack against the Harris campaign, unveiled last month: “Kamala is for they/them. President Trump is for you.” The ads combine the Trump campaign’s focus on immigration and anti-trans propaganda, featuring images of visibly gender-nonconforming people including Jonathan Van Ness and drag performer Pattie Gonia, neither of whom consented for their likenesses to be used. Pattie Gonia said she is reviewing her legal options this week, while using the unwanted attention to stage a $15,000 fundraiser for gender-affirming care.
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In congressional and state-level races, Republicans like Ted Cruz and Josh Hawley have also devoted millions to ads that accuse their opponents of enabling violence against cisgender women by supporting trans girls’ right to compete in school sports. In Montana, the Times noted, Republicans have run five ads attacking Sen. Jon Tester on trans rights (and an alleged lack of support for “white farmers”), ominously warning that Tester “is listening to them.” (No, not us.)
The Senate Leadership Fund, a conservative PAC linked to Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell, released its first ad this month attacking Wisconsin Sen. Tammy Baldwin for allegedly supporting “sex change surgeries for minor children” (likely in reference to Baldwin’s vote against a 2023 bill that would have banned gender-affirming medical care for minors in her state). Others, like one ad for Republican Marsha Blackburn in Tennessee, feature former college swimmer turned anti-trans advocate Riley Gaines and her claims of being “forced” by “woke politics” to compete against trans swimmer Lia Thomas, who she misgenders.
Democrats and LGBTQ+ advocates have roundly condemned the slate of ads for spreading intolerance and bigotry, and believe they’re a losing strategy for candidates who want to obscure their actual positions to voters. “It’s campaigns who don’t have a record to run on, or don’t want their record reflected,” Equality Texas interim CEO Brad Pritchett told Spectrum News 1 this week, referring to anti-trans ads from Cruz and former Rep. Mayra Flores. Sean Meloy, vice president of political programs for the LGBTQ+ Victory Fund, called the ads “a Hail Mary pass” to drive “the most extreme and bigoted people” to vote Republican in comments to NBC. Minnesota Rep. Leigh Finke, the state’s first out trans legislator, told the Times that “[t]here is no way for the data to show that trans inclusion is somehow a threat to cis people,” adding that the ads’ arguments are based on “someone’s feelings” rather than reality.
It’s true that Republicans that leaned on transphobia in 2022 and 2023 failed to capture the gains they sought, as national polling suggested most voters wanted candidates to either protect trans people or leave them alone. One conservative campaign to link an abortion referendum in Ohio to trans rights failed last year by a 13-point margin. In fact, some candidates have already tried and failed to ride such propaganda through the 2024 season. More than a dozen “anti-woke” school board candidates in St. Louis alone all lost their races earlier this year. In Missouri, a right-wing candidate for Secretary of State who told voters not to be “weak and gay” and attacked her opponent for having a trans grandchild only managed a sixth-place primary finish. Recent polling has also shown broad support for trans acceptance in key battleground states. But 2024 could still tell a different story, as Republicans increasingly press Democrats on inclusive school sports policies — a topic on which U.S. voters lean conservative, despite data showing trans women and girls are not inherently advantaged over cis athletes.
A 2023 poll from the University of Michigan found that the divide on trans sports bans shifts more liberal among younger voters, but those aren’t the people Republicans are targeting in their current ads. Trump pollster Jim McLaughlin told the Times that mothers “get really visibly angry” when trans inclusion is (falsely) pitted against their daughters as a safety or fairness concern. The GOP is also trying to use anti-trans animus to shore up numbers among Black voters, as occurred in 2022, when various conservative groups spent $50 million on radio ads alone that targeted Black and Latinx communities. (A study commissioned by the National Black Justice Coalition in June found that Black voters largely supported LGBTQ+ rights, but tended to be less enthusiastic about trans issues in particular.) As the Times noted, the Trump ad buys during sports games are positioned to reach Black men like radio host Charlamagne tha God, who has previously expressed anti-trans sentiments during past shows. Charlamagne called the Trump ads “effective” on his show The Breakfast Club, saying, “when you hear the narrator say, ‘Kamala supports taxpayer-funded sex changes for prisoners’ [...] hell no, I don’t want my taxpayer dollars going to that.”
Further complicating matters is the fact that Democrats have largely remained silent on trans-specific issues, focusing instead on their own base-motivating talking points like protecting abortion rights. Some Democrats like Texas Rep. Vicente Gonzalez have gone so far as to affirm they will “never” support public funding for gender-affirming surgeries, while the Harris/Walz campaign has remained largely silent on trans rights, instead claiming vaguely to support a person’s right to “love who they love” — leftover rhetoric from same-sex marriage campaigns of the 2010s. Democratic strategist Charlotte Clymer, who is trans, told NBC she had “heard nothing” from the Harris camp about trans issues, adding Harris was “completely obsessed” with other issues and that protecting trans rights “simply hasn’t come up.”
Unfortunately, both these versions of the 2024 election story might be true: Republicans may be running a desperation play, but even a Hail Mary throw can sometimes score a touchdown. “Republicans are worried. How worried they are is sort of unknown, but the fact that they're shifting to the kind of mobilization phase of the campaign so early means that they want to make sure that they hit their numbers,” University of Houston political science professor Brandon Rottinghaus told Chron last week. “Turnout is really critical, and these kinds of ads are perfectly designed to inflame and turn out base voters.”
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