The issue of transgender ideology is one of the reasons why former President Donald Trump won reelection, according to The New York Times.
In a lengthy piece analyzing the outcome of the 2024 election, Shane Goldmacher, Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan acknowledged that Vice President Kamala Harris’ stance on transgender issues, highlighted by Trump, made her “look like a lightweight” and “unserious.”
Trump’s team began running ads attacking Harris on her position on transgender inmates, specifically, using taxpayers’ money to fund irreversible gender-reassignment surgery.
“Every transgender inmate in the prison system would have access,” Harris said in a clip from 2019 used in the widely-circulated ad (via NYT):
But the ad, with its vivid tagline — “Kamala is for they/them. President Trump is for you” — broke through in Mr. Trump’s testing to an extent that stunned some of his aides.
So they poured still more money into the ads, running them during football games, which prompted Charlamagne Tha God, the host of the Breakfast Club, a popular show among Black listeners, to express exasperation — and his on-air complaints gave the Trump team fodder for yet another commercial. The Charlamagne ad ranked as one of the Trump team’s most effective 30-second spots, according to an analysis by Future Forward, Ms. Harris’s leading super PAC. It shifted the race 2.7 percentage points in Mr. Trump’s favor after viewers watched it.
The anti-trans ads cut to the core of the Trump argument: that Ms. Harris was “dangerously liberal” — the exact vulnerability her team was most worried about. The ads were effective with Black and Latino men, according to the Trump team, but also with moderate suburban white women who might be concerned about transgender athletes in girls’ sports.
Those were the same suburban women Ms. Harris was trying to mobilize with ads about abortion.
At one point, the Times noted, former President Bill Clinton told an associate, “We have to answer it and say we won’t do it.” The Harris campaign did not heed his advice. When Clinton brought it up to the campaign, they responded by claiming that the Trump ads were not making an impact. Obviously, this proved to be false.
According to Decision Desk, Trump garnered 312 electoral votes, completely annihilating Harris.
In the aftermath of the election, MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough ranted about how Democrats are out of touch with everyday Americans on cultural issues, including the transgender issue.
“Democrats should be smarter on the women’s athletics thing. Eighty-five percent of Americans oppose men transitioning after puberty and competing against women….I’ve been saying this for years. This is not a hard call…one way we don’t do this is by allowing men who transition after puberty competing against young girls who have been working their entire lives to be as good as they can be and then they get destroyed,” he said.
MSNBC: Kamala + Democrats lost the election by pushing too hard on transgender culture issues. pic.twitter.com/q1RjoGScEk
— Mary Margaret Olohan (@MaryMargOlohan) November 6, 2024
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