Republicans Are Betting on Anti-Trans Prejudice to Win Swing States

Republicans have pushed anti-trans messages in campaigns and attack ads for nearly a decade now; whether in service of ballot measures, judges, or candidates for state and national office, rarely has this tactic delivered them victory. So why have Republican groups devoted millions of dollars to pushing anti-trans ads meant to defeat Democrats in 2024? So far, nearly $70 million has been spent on anti-trans ads attacking Democratic candidates in 10 Senate races and nine House districts. Nearly $20 million, according to numbers from AdImpact, was spent on just one anti-trans ad attacking Harris, running over the last three weeks primarily but not only in swing states, with another $12 million on a copy-cat ad. Both ads—titled “Insane” and ”Access”—push a Trump slogan: “Kamala is for They/Them, Trump is for You.”

These attacks have become the “closing message” from Trump and other Republican candidates to voters—as if this were a trial, and this is what they want jurors to have top of mind as they go into deliberations. “While transgender athletes aren’t a top priority for voters nationwide, the GOP is betting that emphasizing the issue will turn off some independents to Democrats while juicing the Republican base,” as Punchbowl News put it Tuesday. “They hope the theme will resonate with, say, suburban moderates,” the Washington Post noted this week, “who are uncertain whether transgender girls should be allowed to play girls’ sports, just as much as it does with the rally-going MAGA faithful.”

Buoying all this is Trump, who has directed anger against trans people from the rally stage—mocking drag performers and singling out HHS assistant secretary Rachel Levine, one of very few visible and high-ranking trans members of any administration. He has also rambled in friendly media appearances about trans people being a threat to children.

These ads don’t have to appeal to a significant swath of the electorate in order to work. “There’s a misunderstanding for how the Republican Party and the Christian nationalist movement see this issue and the way they use it,” Imara Jones, host and executive producer of the podcast series The Anti-Trans Hate Machine, told me this week by phone. Republicans know this isn’t a majority vote getter, Jones said, and thus their anti-trans ads are designed to move a very small number of voters, in very close races. “In that way, this year’s race is kind of tailor made for it.”

Jones has investigated the ways these anti-trans messages have been constructed and tested, years before this campaign. One example would be appeals to “protect girls’ sports,” the anti-trans framing advanced by the far-right law project Alliance Defending Freedom as part of their mission to pass sports bans in state legislatures and to challenge trans girls’ participation in girls’ sports in court. These policy and legal campaigns over the last four years have served as a testing ground for the messages in the ads. Anti-LGBTQ content creators have played a role, too, in spreading such messages. The X account Libs of TikTok helped drive a moral panic over drag performers and redefine “groomer” as an anti-LGBTQ slur.

This right-wing obsession with drag as predatory flew under many people’s radar. But when Trump puts up images of drag performers at his rallies for the crowd to boo at, these are the messages he’s drawing on. He’s doing Libs of TikTok live. “Boys in girls’ sports” is also a meme in that vein. It’s familiar to these audiences and others steeped in the vernacular of the Christian and far right. But this fearmongering may also cause some voters to pause when they hear that a candidate they considered voting for supports “boys in girls’ sports.”

These ads, which portray support for the rights and well-being of trans people as “crazy,” and by extension portray trans people as undeserving of rights, don’t just reflect years of message-crafting on the American right. They’re also evidence of how quickly anti-trans politics have gone mainstream in recent years years, driven by Republicans but on Democrats’ watch. 

Over the last seven years, the number of people who say a man or a woman is defined by the sex assigned at their birth has actually increased, according to Pew Research Center. Those who said sex assigned at birth determines gender rose from 54 percent in 2017, to 56 percent in 2021, to 60 percent in 2022, to 65 as of August 2024 (albeit in a slightly different poll of registered voters rather than all U.S. adults). The partisan divide, however, is stark—in 2024, 39 percent of Harris supporters said that sex as assigned at birth determines who is a man who is a woman, along with 92 percent of Trump supporters.

Perhaps it is not surprising, then, when 60 percent of respondents said that sex assigned at birth defines gender, that 58 percent said they favored laws or policies that “require trans athletes compete on teams that match the sex they were assigned at birth.” Sports bans were also the anti-trans policy respondents said they supported most, compared with support for bans on gender-affirming care for minors (46 percent), bathrooms bans and bans on teaching about gender identity in elementary school (41 percent for each). This might be why the sports bans are featured so prominently in Republican ads attacking Democrats. However, when the same survey asked about supporting laws or policies that would “protect transgender people from discrimination in jobs, housing, and public spaces,” 64 percent said they favored such anti-discrimination protections, and only 10 percent opposed. Yet bathroom bans and bans on health care access would violate anti-discrimination laws. So would sports bans. Who are these people?

“What I would say is that the public really does have very complicated views about this,” said Juliana Horowitz, senior associate director of research at Pew Research Center, and who worked on this survey, when we spoke by phone this week. “I think that sometimes in the national discourse, you want to put people neatly into boxes, you know, people who think this or who think that about trans issues, and what we see in the survey is that it’s really not that straightforward—that people do have views that may seem to be in conflict with each other at times.”

It’s possible that some voters think that being a man or a woman is defined forever at birth (and therefore believe trans athletes should be forced to play with those assigned the same sex as them at birth), but also consider themselves opposed to discrimination against trans people. Pew did ask further questions about what influenced respondents’ views on whether men and women are defined by their assigned sex at birth: both groups about equally said that science factored into their views. “That was a really interesting finding,” Horowitz said. “People who have come to different conclusions are both saying that it’s based on what they know from science.”

One thing the survey didn’t ask is what respondents know about the current state of the anti-trans laws they were asked about. Are they aware, in other words, whether their favored policies are in effect—do they know more than half the country’s states ban gender-affirming care for minors and the Supreme Court is considering upholding such a ban this term, or that about half of states lack explicit anti-discrimination protections for gender identity? There’s reason to believe they may not know this. The Pew survey found that in 2022, very few people were paying attention to these laws—8 percent overall said they were following news about policies related to trans people very or extremely closely, and a little more than two-thirds said they followed such news a little or not at all.  It’s possible that in the two years since more people are following news about such anti-trans laws. But some voters may hear these messages for the first time in these campaigns.

A majority of American adults purportedly support the anti-trans sports bans the Republican ads are using to attack Democrats. At the same time, a majority want trans people to be protected from discrimination by law. And very, very few know anything about the stakes of trans people’s lives when it comes to the law. Assuming all that to be true, then—will these anti-trans ads work this year?

Those laws may be one indicator they can. “Already half the states have passed some kind of anti-trans legislation, specifically dealing with kids. So you already have a ripe environment for this issue, for a political constituency already engaged around this,” Jones told me. “And it’s making it harder for Democrats to try to find their footing and a response.”

Some of the Democrats targeted have by now responded with their own ads. But the ads made by campaigns for Senator Sherrod Brown and Representative Colin Allred—meant to address their opponents’ claims that they support “biological transgender men” in girls’ and women’s sports—“have not inspired trans folks that they’ll have our back,” MSNBC columnist Katelyn Burns recently wrote. Allred’s ad stated he didn’t support “boys playing girls’ sports,” without any clarity on what he meant by that, while Brown’s ad says that transgender girls have “already been banned” from playing girls’ sports in his state. Neither ad says that excluding trans girls from sports is wrong. “It may seem like a sensible political strategy, given how radioactive the polling is about trans athletes,” wrote Burns, “but characterizing trans girls as boys in a sports context would lead one to characterize them as such in other contexts, too.” Rather than point to their own records of affirming trans rights, Democrats have ignored them. Even Harris, when asked in an interview about the ads attacking her over gender-affirming care for incarcerated trans people, simply responded that she was following the law.

Whoever these ads are for, whether they win this election or not, they are landing in a moment of increasing scapegoating of trans people. Jones recently reported on groups such as the Proud Boys, who since the January 6 attack on the Capitol and the ensuing prosecutions of their leadership have intensified their harassment of queer and trans people as a recruitment tactic. “I cannot help but be very aware of the fact that in the closing days of the campaign that they are dumping an inordinate amount of money and putting the time of their candidate into … talking about trans people in this way,” said Jones. “I think that that message is heard by these groups.”

Trump made an appearance on Tuesday at a barber shop in the Bronx, aired on Fox, in which he claimed, “There are some places, your boy leaves the school, comes back a girl. Without parental consent. What is that all about?” Some of the men who could be seen on camera laughed, a few nodded. Maybe the claim sounded like another nonsense Trump line to a lot of viewers. Or they might not know that such claims have led to bomb threats against schools and health clinics, led trans kids to higher rates of attempted suicide. And some viewers might not register Trump’s lies about trans kids and schools until hearing them repeated in an ad later.  Maybe some will go on to repeat it online. Maybe some will act on it, on election day or after.