After their defeat in 2020, the Republican Party turned to transgender rights issues to win over voters. The strategy was central to their 2024 campaigns, and they’re making it clear that they’re sticking with it through at least the 2026 elections.
So Democrats had better come up with a response that’s better than ignoring the issue. And one election that was just held in Nebraska shows a possible way forward.
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It’s hard to imagine, but before the 2020 elections, Republicans didn’t care quite as much about transgender people just living their lives. No state had passed a law yet banning transgender students from participating in school sports or banning trans kids from getting healthcare. Donald Trump’s campaign against Joe Biden was largely free of references to trans people that year, and after the H.B. 2 debacle in North Carolina, it looked like it was an issue that couldn’t drive voters to the polls for Republicans.
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But things changed after Trump’s defeat in 2020 and the January 6 insurrection. Republican activists urged the party to use this issue to distract from the GOP’s failures, and the national party took them up on it. State legislatures across the country started trying to pass laws restricting trans kids’ rights. Online, conservatives like Chaya Raichik of LibsofTikTok pushed the notion that schools were turning kids transgender, usually by just posting videos of teachers talking about hanging rainbow flags in their classrooms.
Then came the 2024 election, where one of Trump’s biggest attacks on Kamala Harris was that she was “for they/them, President Trump is for you.” The idea that Harris – who studiously avoided talking about transgender people’s rights during the campaign – was obsessed with trans rights at the expense of all other issues was absurd, but the messaging worked.
That’s because it was never about transgender people per se. The pandemic changed the world in 2020, and there’s a general, inchoate feeling that everything is different now, and people see that difference as a deterioration. Social media rewards negativity. Algorithms promote content that says, “The world has gone to hell,” while ignoring people posting, “Things are actually going just fine for me.” Even if people think that things are going well in their lives, they now believe that everything is worse for everyone else, because that’s the only knowledge they’re exposed to.
Trans people—as well as the spate of inflation in 2022 and 2023 and the bogeyman of “DEI”—were easy ways to explain to low-information voters why everything feels worse in 2024 than it did in 2019.
The problem is that Democrats are obsessed with culture war issues and people who aren’t like you, Republicans told these voters. They don’t care about you, so they aren’t doing anything to help you. Sure, we’re the only ones who keep on bringing up trans issues, but you’re not going to actually look into what’s happening and read real news sources. You’ll trust our ads and social media messaging and blame Democrats for the hundreds and hundreds of anti-trans bills we’re introducing.
This strategy worked in 2024, and Republicans are showing that they aren’t going to let go of it that easily. Even though the red states that could pass anti-trans laws have already done so, Republicans are coming up with new ways of keeping attacks on trans people alive in state legislatures.
Does a red state already have a trans sports ban? OK, what it needs now is a law defining “male” and “female”! Does it already have a ban on gender-affirming care? How about a bill banning employers from requiring employees to use trans people’s pronouns?
Sure, these laws will affect even fewer people than the previous round, but they keep Democrats on the defensive!
That’s why Republican lawmakers filed 865 anti-LGBTQ+ bills in 2025 so far. They have to keep this issue in the public eye.
Democrats need a better response to this than the Harris-Walz campaign’s tactic of just ignoring it, and one election in Nebraska is showing that there is a way to do it. Democrat John Ewing just won the mayoral election in Omaha against a Republican incumbent, Mayor Jean Stothert, who tried to make the election all about trans rights.
According to journalist Erin Reed, Stothert “saturated” the market with ads claiming that Ewing “stands with radicals” on “boys in girls’ bathrooms and sports.” But Ewing didn’t just take the attacks, he hit back and accused Stothert of being “focused on potties” while he was “focused on fixing potholes.”
One ad showed a photoshopped picture of Stothert looking under a bathroom stall door, an image that wouldn’t even need to be photoshopped for some Republicans who are obsessed with which bathroom trans people use.
Out state Sen. Megan Hunt (I) said that “Stothert made the entire end of her campaign about” discriminating against trans people, but “regular Americans don’t react to or receive the call to trans panic. Enough. We are speaking to the future.”
Rep. Nancy Mace (R-SC) has been posting hundreds of times per week about trans people since the 2024 elections. The House committee on government efficiency – which is supposed to be about spending, staffing, and budgets – just held a hearing about trans girls playing sports for reasons people who attended didn’t even understand. Trump himself has signed multiple executive orders about trans people while saying out loud that he “couldn’t care less” about rising prices, that people will have to get by with less, and that he is “OK” with starting a recession if he can meet his ideological policy goals.
That is, it wouldn’t be that hard to portray Republicans as obsessed with trans people at the expense of caring about things that actually affect most Americans’ lives.
As the expression says, every Republican accusation is a confession. Democrats have, for the most part, tried to stop the wave of anti-trans legislation and have had success in states where voters gave them majorities in the legislature. But they are definitely not prioritizing LGBTQ+ people over the economy and other issues. Republicans are doing that. And voters need to be told that over and over.
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