Democratic candidates are squirming and retreating under a barrage of TV attack ads that spotlight their support for transgenderism and men’s participation in women’s sports.
“Crazy liberal Kamala is for They/Them: President Trump is for you,” said the kicker at the end of one widespread pro-Trump TV ad.
The popular theme is helping Republicans win back crucial support from women voters. “One of the things you see in the focus groups is the moms get really visibly angry on this issue,” Jim McLaughlin, a GOP pollster told the New York Times. “It’s a fairness issue — They don’t want their daughters to lose a [sports] scholarship, and they don’t want them to get hurt.”
Trump and other GOP candidates are spending heavily on the theme and are splitting the Democrats’ base from swing voters.
For example, Texas Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) hammered his Texas rival, Rep. Colin Allred (D-TX), during their debates:
The attack did so much damage that Allred reversed himself on the transgender issue:
Pro-transgenderism advocates complained that Allred’s retreat will hurt his turnout because the Democratic base is pro-transgender.
“Democrats have largely ignored the [campaign] ads … [but] Colin Allred, became the first major Democratic candidate in this election cycle to seemingly capitulate to Republican messaging,” author Erin Reed, a man who insists he is a woman, complained.
He continued:
Colin Allred’s ad could be seen as a troubling signal that the danger of capitulation is always present. Advocates for transgender rights will likely need to continue applying pressure on Democratic candidates to uphold their value as human beings and their importance as voting constituents.
Allred “threw transgender people under the bus,” Mike Figueredo, a progressive YouTube advocate, complained in the video. “Democrats who abandon trans rights do so at their own peril.”
Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-OH), is also running away from his pro-transgender record, according to an October 16 post at LGBTQnation.com:
Brown’s ad is a response to a smear campaign from the Ohio Republican PAC Senate Leadership Fund, which has spent millions of dollars on ads attacking trans people. One ad says Brown “voted multiple times to allow transgender biological males in women’s sports” and “supported allowing minor children to receive sex change surgeries.”
“This is exactly what you want as a Republican candidate — for your opponent to capitulate,” Terry Schilling, president of the American Principles Project, which has helped magnify the popular issue in GOP politics.
He told Breitbart News:
They’re damned if they do, damned if they don’t, and they have to choose: Do I want to try and salvage my swing voters and lose my base? Or do I want to just give up on the swing voters and maximize base count? It forces them to make a very difficult decision that most politicians don’t want to make.
“Since the beginning of August, Republicans have poured more than $65 million into television ads in more than a dozen states on these topics in some of the country’s most competitive races,” the New York Times wrote, adding:
“It’s one of the issues where Democrats are furthest from the center of the country,” said Brad Todd, a Republican ad maker who has produced commercials on transgender issues in multiple races this year. “They are doing something that is totally illogical to appease a tiny slice that is very radical in their base.”
Many polls show the public opposes core tenets of transgenderism, including the demand that men be freely allowed into girls’ and women’s sports, bathrooms, and other single-sex places and institutions. This month, for example, the Center Square conducted a poll showing that 59 percent of 2,650 registered voters oppose transgender-related medical treatments for minors. The treatments are opposed by 88 percent of GOP voters, 56 percent of independents, and 33 percent of Democratic voters.
The issue helps win back a large slice of women who oppose the GOP’s abortion record, Schilling told Breitbart News:
What we’ve seen in our polling and in our focus groups is that while these suburban women are really upset about abortion, they also don’t like the idea of men taking over their private spaces and men taking over their sports — and they definitely don’t like giving sex-change procedures to minors. And so it’s not enough [for the GOP] to win the suburbs, but it is enough to peel …. probably five to seven percent of women.
“On many issues surrounding trans rights and students or youth, the GOP has public opinion on their side,” pollster David Byler, at Noble Predictive Insights, told The Center Square. He added:
There’s a reason that, when you look at GOP ads, they are constantly hammering this and other related issues. And some prominent Democrats are pushing out moderate, rather than left, messages.
Republicans know that trans issues are a strong social issue for them – and after getting hit hard on abortion so many times since Dobbs, they want to make sure they’re pushing back and finding social issues that work for them.
Here is a Trump ad hitting Harris for her support of transgenderism:
However, Republicans are being careful to dodge the Democrats’ usual strategy of portraying transgenderism advocates as vulnerable victims of GOP bullying. The strategy often works because many swing voters want to protect what they see as vulnerable minorities, such as gay and lesbian teenagers who seek support by declaring themselves as transgender.
In prior years, GOP politicians were sometimes cautious about the issue, said Schilling:
I would give them a B minus last year because they were right on the issue, they had public positions that were popular on the issues with women’s sports. But this year, I’m giving them an A because they’re actually running campaign ads on it. They’re putting millions of dollars into attacking Kamala on the transgender issue. Donald Trump gets an A+.
This Trump ad was aimed at voters with ties to the U.S. military:
Amusingly, the Democrats’ vulnerability on the issue has been increased by years of pro-transgender coverage in the establishment media, the Wall Street Journal’s editorial board said:
This media conformity is one reason the transgender sports issue is catching Democrats by surprise. The press portrays any dissent on the issue as out of political bounds and gives it no coverage or dismisses as benighted bias what millions of Americans view as common sense. This means voters may hear about it only when a politician makes it a campaign issue, and it might cost Democrats control of Congress this year.
So-called “Fact Checkers” are also rushing to defend Democrats, even to the point of ignoring Congress’s use of its broad-brush spending power to block or promote particular agendas:
The transgender issue is not a surprise to readers of Breitbart News, which has been covering the sex-mashing transgenderism ideology since at least 2008.
The issue has also been amplified by pro-transgender school policies, which are often hidden from parents:
