Former president Donald Trump and other GOP candidates are increasingly targeting transgender people in the final days before the election, invoking them as boogeymen at rallies and pouring millions into advertising tying Democrats to transgender rights. At a recent Trump rally in Reno, Nevada, the Trump campaign played a video that included Rachel Levine, the highest-ranking transgender official in the Biden administration, wishing people a happy Pride Month. The crowd booed. When the screen cut to a TikTok video of a drag queen, the crowd booed even louder, Leigh Ann reports with our colleagues Liz Goodwin and Justine McDaniel. Trump is also blasting a different version of that message into the homes of persuadable voters across the country, where his campaign and its allies have run ads highlighting Vice President Kamala Harris’s support for gender-affirming surgeries for prisoners and undocumented migrants. The strategy is part of a broader push by down-ballot Republicans to make attacks on transgender rights a closing piece of the party’s message. They hope the theme will resonate with suburban moderates who are uneasy with questions of gender identity — such as whether transgender girls should be allowed to play on girls’ sports teams — just as much with as it does with the rally-going MAGA faithful. And it is particularly effective, some campaign officials and strategists argue, with Black and Hispanic voters who tend to lean culturally conservative. The Trump effort Trump’s campaign and allied super PAC, MAGA Inc., have spent more than $29 million on ads airing in battleground states and nationally, including during heavily watched broadcasts of professional football games. The ads play video of Harris from a candidate forum in 2019 saying she supports publicly funded transgender health care for prisoners. “Kamala’s agenda is they/them. President Trump is for you,” a narrator in every transgender-focused Trump ads says. The most recent version of the ad campaign aims to appeal to Black voters and features an exasperated Charlamagne tha God, a popular Black radio host, talking about how Harris backs transgender health care for prisoners. “Hell no, I don’t want my taxpayer dollars going to that,” Charlamagne says. Trump campaign manager Chris LaCivita says the attacks are working because they play into some voters’ concerns that Harris’s views are too liberal, while also reinforcing Trump’s long-standing message that he’ll protect his voters from rapid social changes in the country. “If you can be successful in defining through her own words that she could be for something as radical as that, then it makes other issues like raising taxes [or] open borders that much more believable,” LaCivita said in an interview. (The economy and border security continue to be driving issues for voters this campaign.) Harris’s response Democrats question the efficacy of the argument and say Republicans are stirring up hatred for a group of people who make up less than 1 percent of the population and already face discrimination. But Harris hasn’t directly responded to the attacks in her own campaign ads or in her stump speeches. When asked to comment, a Harris campaign spokeswoman pointed to the candidate’s recent Fox News interview, when she said she would “follow the law” in response to a question about providing gender-affirming surgeries to prisoners. In the interview, Harris pointed out that the Trump administration also provided gender-affirming care to prisoners, which some federal courts have ruled the government is required to do under the Constitution. Anat Shenker-Osorio, a Democratic strategist and messaging researcher, studied the effects of the Trump ad that accuses Harris of wanting to fund gender-confirming surgeries for undocumented migrants in prison and saw that it moved about 1 percent of voters — potentially significant in an election that could be decided by just thousands of votes in a handful of states. “They have unleashed what I call the ‘turducken’ of hate-baiting and woven together anti-immigrant, tough-on-crime and anti-trans messaging,” she said. The Senate races The Senate Leadership Fund (SLF), a super PAC that helps elect Republicans to the Senate, has tied Democrats to policies such as transgender girls playing in girls’ sports or minors receiving gender-affirming care in purple and red states including Ohio, Wisconsin, Montana and Pennsylvania. In Ohio, where Republican Bernie Moreno is trying to unseat Democratic Sen. Sherrod Brown, SLF has spent $29 million on four ads accusing him of voting to allow “transgender biological males to compete in girls sports and introduced a bill letting men into girls locker rooms and bathrooms.” PolitiFact, the political fact-checking organization, has rated the ad “false.” In the crucial U.S. Senate race in Montana, which could decide control of the chamber, Republican candidate Tim Sheehy stresses that “boys are boys and girls are girls” in his stump speech, a line that may have more resonance in a red state where Republicans have battled with Montana’s first-ever transgender lawmaker over transgender issues in the past few years. In Texas, Sen. Ted Cruz (R) and the political groups supporting him have spent $11 million attacking Rep. Colin Allred (D) on transgender issues — including in one ad where a large man in an “Allred” jersey tackles a young girl during a football game. “Colin Allred could have stopped men from competing in women’s sports. But instead, he voted against our girls. What kind of man does that?” says the narrator in an ad by Truth and Courage PAC. Republicans point to Democrats’ support of the Equality Act, a bill that protects against discrimination based on gender identity and sexual orientation in “public accommodations,” which Republicans say could include bathrooms, locker rooms and girls’ sports. That bill passed the House but has not been voted on in the Senate. Democrats’ response The onslaught of attacks forced Brown to respond. He released an ad on Sunday in which a narrator directly rebuts a flurry of recent GOP ads that say he supports transgender athletes. Brown’s campaign pointed out that transgender kids are already banned from playing in sports that conform to their gender identity in Ohio, and it said Brown agrees with Republican Gov. Mike DeWine that decisions about sports should be made at the local level. Allred, a former linebacker for the Tennessee Titans, cut his own ad in response. “I’m a dad. I’m also a Christian. My faith has taught me that all kids are God’s kids. So let me be clear. I don’t want boys playing girls’ sports or any of this ridiculous stuff that Ted Cruz is saying,” Allred says to camera. Read the full story. |