The ten words that shook the election

“Kamala Harris is for they/them. Trump is for you.”

In the final weeks of the 2024 election, the Trump campaign spent 20% of it total ad spend broadcasting an ad denouncing Harris’s support for certain transgender rights. The ad concluded: “Kamala Harris is for they/them. Trump is for you.”

One version of the ad took aim at Harris’s support for sex change surgeries for prisoners and for biological males competing in women’s sports. An earlier version mentioned only the surgeries.

On one level, the ad is straight out of the GOP’s “divide and conquer” playbook, “othering” an already marginalized group so as to bring fear and resentment to the forefront of voters’ minds. But the ad’s real superpower is that it resonates with what many voters across the political spectrum were already feeling: Ignored.

One of the most striking findings documented by pollsters in the runup to the election was the number of “double haters” — voters who didn’t think either candidate understood or cared about people like them. These voters are predominantly working class and are focused on the cost of living. They are, in Democratic pollster Celinda Lake’s words, “the most important category that no one is talking about.” By Election Day, they constituted roughly 8% of the electorate, and they broke for Trump by at least 14 points.

For all the condescending hand-wringing about what ignorant dupes American voters supposedly are, they’re wise to at least one thing: Both parties serve the donor class. Economic and political elites are the real “they/them” but, since no major political candidate wants to talk about that, what we get instead is a proxy war: Dems are for trans people and illegal immigrants (them). Republicans are for white nationalists and toxic men (them). Who’s for us? No one, apparently, but Trump is shameless and shrewd enough to pretend he is.

I can imagine a parallel universe where Harris ran an ad reminding voters that Trump shafted his chauffeur, his contractors, his waiters…the list goes on. Hardworking Americans swindled by a billionaire: “Trump is for Trump. Kamala Harris is for you.” Someone needed to connect with the widespread feeling of being disregarded by—and alienated from—the political class. In 2016 and 2024, that someone was Trump.

He is not going to build hospitals or affordable housing or break up Big Ag monopolies. He’s unlikely to tame inflation, and most of his tax cuts will be for the rich. But he gets away with proclaiming his solidarity with ordinary Americans by acting aggrieved on their behalf. Why are the leftist crazies obsessed with trans everything while you, the hardworking Americans, are losing your homes, your farms, your health, and your livelihoods? Why do they look down on the places you call home and act like “flyover country” deserves to collapse?

The “Trump is for you” half of the slogan works as a shorthand for (probably bogus) political empathy. What about the other half? “Harris is for they/them.” This half operates on two somewhat paradoxical levels—first, it suggests (falsely) that Harris prioritized an issue (transgender rights) that most people don’t care much about. Second, to the extent that people do care about the transgender rights championed by the social justice left broadly, they’re not too wild about some of them.

A Gallup poll showed voters ranking transgender rights as the least important of 22 issues. A Blueprint poll done immediately after the election showed that voters’ third-ranked reason for voting for Trump was too much focus on transgender issues instead of helping the middle class. Internal research by the Harris campaign concluded that voters don’t care much about transgender rights and resent what they see as an excessive focus on the issue on the part of Democrats.

Voters aren’t necessarily hostile toward transgender people — 60% of Americans support anti-discrimination laws that protect them. What they object to is the elevation of a handful of demands that go beyond the conventional civil rights framework (eg. marriage equality and banning discrimination in employment and housing). We’re talking here about children’s access to hormones and surgeries, and the presence of biological males in women’s sports, locker rooms, spas, and prisons. Americans don’t want transgender people losing their jobs or their housing. But they also don’t want to see kids on a fast track to making permanent changes to their bodies, nor do they want their daughters to have to compete against categorically bigger and stronger male athletes.

Trump succintly uses “they/them” as a stand-in for a handful of novel and, in some instances, dangerous ideas, most of which Harris has not taken a position on. But because Harris did voice support for prisoners’ right to taxpayer-funded sex-change operations, it was plausible to assume she’s also on board with other trans causes, most of which are unpopular.

Though she barely mentioned transgender rights during her campaign, Harris was seen as “for they/them”, because liberals devote a disproportionate amount of mindshare to trans issues. Liberal politicians, journalists and social media warriors are relatively silent about debt-plagued farmers, opioid-ravaged post-industrial factory towns, and tenants priced out by rich “gentrivacationers.” They seem unaware of women giving birth on country highways or dying en route to distant hospitals. But drag queen story hour being threatened? Now, that’s an emergency. (Their excessive focus is, to some degree, a defensive reaction to the right-wing’s obsession, but they don’t have to bite every baitworm Tucker Carlson dangles. They’re not doing themselves any favors by continually burnishing their image as an insular group who believes things that are outside the mainstream).

Trump got 2.3 million more votes than Harris. We’ll never know how many of them were swayed by this ad, but you better believe Trump’s campaign tested the heck out of it before throwing down $37 million to air it 30,000 times in every swing state. A Harris super-PAC said the ad shifted viewers 2.7 points toward Trump.

Dems need to fine-tune their transgender platform and, in the process, should consider public opinion, including diverging viewpoints among fellow Dems who have been afraid to voice their true opinions for fear of ostracism. If they’re going to take unpopular positions, or positions that are in tension with the safety and rights of biological women, they’d better be prepared to defend them, and not by trying to change the subject. If the Dems are going to be for they/them, they’ll need to answer to the objections of the you’s.