The Secret Weapon That Went Pffft: The GOP’s Anti-Trans Attack Ads

Republicans entered the 2026 mid-terms in a bad position. Donald Trump has completely taken over the party, effectively crushing anyone who doesn’t go along with his mad decrees. At the same time, inflation is up, ICE is brutalizing people across the country, gas and groceries are expensive, and the United States is trapped in a war with Iran that no one can figure out how to win. The President’s poll numbers were already abysmal and getting worse every month.The Republicans desperately needed a topic to focus on in the election. They settled on demonizing transgender people, with more than a little help from Elon Musk.Polling has shown that opposition to transgender women participating in sports and transition-related surgeries for minors are some of the very few issues where Republicans enjoy a public opinion advantage over Democrats. Since 2020, the American Principles Project, a right-wing culture-war pressure group, has pushed the GOP to make transgender people their top target. A staggering $224 million advertising dollars were spent on anti-transgender ads by Trump in 2024, such as the “Kamala is for they/them” advertisement, which ran over 55,000 times.The New York Times estimates that Musk has spent $474 million dollars supporting Republicans in the midterms, even more than he spent in 2024. Just like in 2024, hundreds of millions went into advertisements attacking transgender people, or accusing Democratic candidates of being too supportive of transgender people in general. You would be hard pressed to listen to a speech where Republicans didn’t mention “men in women’s sports” or, as Trump ungrammatically put it, “transgender mutilization.” Nearly every one of Trump’s stump speeches includes the ridiculous accusation that young children come home from school with a sex change.The problem with this Republican strategy is that, while the American public wasn’t supportive of transgender people, most didn’t really care about the issue because it didn’t affect them or anyone they knew. Republicans found out that you can only wave a boogeyman around for so long before people stopped believing him/her/them.Every poll I could find that asked voters what their top priorities were had transgender issues at the bottom. This makes sense, given that there are effectively zero transgender athletes competing at the NCAA or professional level in the United States (and the few who are competing are transgender men who were born female). No one performs “bottom surgery” on transgender youth. The only procedure being performed is breast reduction, and that is exceptionally rare: only perhaps 250 to 300 per year. A Harvard study found that 97 percent of all breast reduction surgeries on teens were performed on cisgender (non-transgender) individuals.What made this bet even worse is the YouGov polling that found that the public trusts Democrats (52 percent) on transgender issues more than Republicans (23 percent). In other words, the people who rated transgender issues as a top priority were more likely to be pro-transgender Democrats than anti-trans Republicans. The GOP bet that they could win an election based on fear and loathing directed at less than 1 percent of the population, on an irrelevant issue that Democrats care more about than the Republican base.The results were entirely predictable.Tuesday night delivered an epic loss for the GOP. It was a curb-stomping for the ages; the sum of all Republican fears. Texas went blue. The House is projected to wind up with 255 seats held by Democrats. If Mary Peltola wins in Alaska and Scott Colom in Mississippi, Democrats will end up with and astounding 55 or 56 seats in the Senate. They came within a whisker of winning Florida and Louisiana as well. By my own estimates, the polls underestimated Democrats by an average of about 3 points. This could be the worst loss we have seen in national politics since Ronald Reagan obliterated Walter Mondale.It is impossible for anyone to say that Republicans made the right choice in focusing their campaign on transgender people. I suppose some (like Musk) would argue that loss would have been worse if not for the anti-transgender ads, but Republicans lost in basically every state where they were the ads were in heavy rotation and hung on by the skin of their teeth in states no one thought would be competitive.It’s also impossible to say that the few Democrats who threw transgender people under the bus profited from it. Some, like Amy Acton in Ohio and Annie Andrews in South Carolina, won in red states; on the other hand, they had comparatively weak opponents like Vivek Ramaswamy and Darline Graham. Ohio Democratic Representative Marcy Kaptur, who had some nasty things to say about transgender people in her political ads, brutally underperformed, being on track to win her district by only 6.8 points in a D+11 year.It’s also difficult to say that supporting transgender people hurt Democratic candidates. Abdul El-Sayed doubled down on his support for transgender people on 60 Minutes on Sunday. He handily beat Mike Rogers by 7 percent in a campaign marred by rampant Islamophobia. Similarly, in Montana, Sam Forstag stood up for trans people during a mid-October debate with his right-wing opponent; he was projected to win his conservative district by 2 points at the time of writing. Senate candidate Peggy Flanagan in Minnesota was a staunch supporter of the transgender community, and she beat polling expectations by even more than the national average.Polling suggests that when pressed on the issue, it’s Democrats, not Republicans, who were more likely to say transgender issues are a priority. Additionally, polling indicates that the public thought Republicans were talking way too much about this issue. Regardless of whether Democratic candidates threw their transgender constituents under the bus, however, Republicans still attempted to smear them with accusations of supporting trans people.The only thing it did was anger a core Democratic constituency. Some Democratic candidates who did flip seemed surprised at how much anger and dissent their transphobic platform created. Dealing with the fallout was a distraction and headache for them and their staff in the waning days of their campaigns. Thus, one could also make the argument that had these candidates not done a heel-turn, they would have done even better given the lack of evidence that this was the issue that drew in centrist voters.I suspect that Democrats will delighted if Republicans choose to make transgender people the centerpiece of their pitch to the American people in 2028 again. Republicans might do it anyway, if Musk and his hundreds of millions of dollars in support for the GOP are predicated on it.In 2024, Republicans ran on transgender issues and mistakenly assumed they won because of it. They didn’t seem to realize that they rode into the White House on the back of public discontent over inflation under Joe Biden (which he handled better than any other G7 nation).Since then, Trump has driven up prices everywhere with his tariffs and wars, while delivering tone-deaf “let them eat cake” speeches. The GOP hitched its wagon to Trump again, made that same bet on campaigning against transgender people in 2026, spending more money than they did on the 2024 election; and then found out the hard way that it was always the economy, stupid. As the kids say these days, Republicans FAFO’d.