Democrats will only further lose elections by scapegoating trans rights

In the post-election blame game, some are targeting trans people. It's ugly. It's also very bad political strategy.

Pamala Paul is an odious feature on the New York Times op-ed page, an anti-trans columnist who exaggerates and distorts data to push a transphobic agenda.

Today she predictably uses all the scapegoating of trans people we’ve seen in the media and among some Democrats and some Never Trump Republicans—the attacks on the Democratic Party for being too “woke” and on the Trump campaign’s anti-trans ad as the supposed causes for Donald Trump’s win—to say that, “On Trans Issues, Voters Want Common Sense.”

But make no mistake: What Paul and others mean by “common sense” is to abandon core rights for trans people, including necessary medical care and protecting trans kids.

The finger-pointing comes as many Democratic consultants, analysts, pundits, and politicians try to cover their own asses on what happened in the election’s aftermath, and transgender people are an easy target.

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Maureen Dowd at the Times, speaking with the various insiders with whom she often chatters, blames it all on woke politics—”woke is broke”—and Trump’s anti-trans ad, while the paper’s Nicholas Kristof said Democrats look like elites “more eager to find them pronouns than housing.”

“The Democrats have to stop pandering to the far left,” Democratic New York Rep. Tom Suozzi told the Times. “I don’t want to discriminate against anybody, but I don’t think biological boys should be playing in girls’ sports. … Democrats aren’t saying that, and they should be.”

MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” has been awash in reciting the consultants, pundits and columnists, and blaming the “woke backlash.”

But here are the facts.

Democrats and Vice President Harris hardly discussed trans issues—and I defy anyone to show me where anyone talked about pronouns—in this campaign. As Parker Malloy notes:

Kamala Harris and the Democratic Party as a whole barely even touched on trans rights during their campaign. They sidestepped any “trans rights” messaging entirely. In fact, they barely acknowledged trans people’s existence at all.

In October, Harris sat down with NBC News, and when asked whether she thought transgender Americans should have access to transition-related healthcare, she hedged. This wasn’t about minors, detainees, or prisoners—it was a question about the 1.6 million trans people in the U.S., including adults who have relied on this care for years. But she couldn’t bring herself to say a clear “yes.”

Just three days before the election, the Times’ Jeremy Peters wrote an article praising Harris’s “identity politics”-free campaign, particularly her avoidance of trans issues.

So, no, Democrats weren’t talking about trans issues. It was Republicans who were, as they have done in every election over the past 10 years or so, with little evidence of success.

Republicans ran similar anti-trans ads in 2018, 2020, and 2022. In each of those elections, they lost big or saw no red wave, respectively. Moms for Liberty candidates for school board races across the country went after trans people in their “anti-woke” crusades and lost big in 2023. Governor Ron DeSantis of Florida ran as the ultimate “anti-woke” crusader in the Republican presidential primary race, and he crashed and burned.

So “anti-woke”—and let’s be clear, the entire “woke” thing is ludicrous—has not been a winner. But trans rights and LGBTQ rights in general actually have galvanized young voters, who embraced equality in elections over the past 10 years and helped put Democrats over the top. Backtracking on trans rights would hurt the party, particularly depressing the youth vote in the way that other causes, like the war in Gaza, have. But it would not be embraced by Democratic voters in general. Hayes Brown at MSNBC explains:

There’s no also evidence that pulling back on protecting trans rights would benefit Democrats. A recent survey from Data for Progress showed that a majority of voters are more likely to support a candidate supportive of transgender rights than one who opposes them. Those numbers are more encouraging when you see that includes 80% of Democrats and 46% of independent/third-party voters.

As I wrote last week, in late October, an independent study by Ground Media released a randomized control trial testing the effectiveness of Trump's anti-trans ads against other ads, and showed it did not have an impact on making people decide between Harris and Trump:

Despite the Trump campaign recently spending nearly $20 million to air anti-transgender TV ads over 55,000 times in battleground states, Ground Media’s study reveals that the ad fails to achieve its political goals. The study compared responses of those who saw the Trump ad to those who saw an unrelated ad, and revealed that the Trump ad yielded no statistically significant shift in voter choice, mobilization or likelihood to vote.

However, the study highlights a more harmful consequence for trans Americans: the ad significantly reduces public acceptance of trans people across nearly all demographics.

It should also be pointed out that, while the GOP spent hundreds of millions of dollars in anti-trans ads in 10 states, including against Democratic Senate candidates, Democrats retained their Senate seats in Wisconsin, Arizona, Nevada, and Michigan and won a slew of other down ballot races in North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin.

And the first openly transgender member of Congress, Sarah McBride, was elected in Delaware. She explained—and everyone should watch this clip—that the party that was focused on trans issues was the Republican Party and Trump.

But most significantly, McBride noted that her district, which is urban, suburban, and rural—the entire state of Delaware, which only has one House member—sits in the Philadelphia media market and was subjected to the anti-trans ads. She not only won her race, but she won by the highest percentage of any candidate running for statewide office in Delaware.

Pamela Paul, in her column, reports that “Harris’s leading super PAC,” told the Times that its research showed votes “shifted 2.7 percentage points toward Trump after watching one of these ads.” You might see this claim, so it needs clarification, as it contradicts the Ground Media study and is being used by some in the media to push the idea that trans rights hurt the Democrats.

First off, Paul makes it seem as if the PAC, Future Forward, was run by the Harris campaign, but of course it was not. Like all outside PACs it had no coordination by law with the Harris campaign, yet it raised hundreds of millions of dollars, and, obviously, like any PAC, it now needs to answer to its donors.

Future Forward came under a lot of scrutiny just before the election, with a massive exposé in the Times—"Inside the Secretive $700 Million Ad-Testing Factory for Kamala Harris”—about its lack of transparency and how it has “drawn suspicion and second-guessing” from Democrats and the Harris campaign. The ad-testing for Future Forward was done at Blue Rose Research, run by David Shor, who himself is controversial for his lack of transparency, making statements about what works and what doesn’t without showing his data.

Shor had actually said in 2021 that Democrats should “embrace social issues that poll well,” like “trans rights,” based on his research. So it just seems odd that now the PAC he works for, needing to answer to donors, is claiming that trans rights worked against Democrats—and of course, in both cases, no data has been offered. So, I’d take anything from Future Forward with a big grain of salt, and trust the independent Ground Media study.

The Democratic Party should not be throwing any vulnerable group under the bus based on pundits’ and consultants’ claims. It’s brutal and completely against what the party stands for. And it would also be a step backward, hurting the party with its own base.