The Democratic Party lost supporters over transgender rights. Gaining Them Back It won’t be simple.
In 2024, the party’s leading position in the electorate advanced ahead of voters, and the current internal discussion highlights a confusion over how to adjust.
For the past four years, Lanae Erickson, a senior vice president at the center-left think tank Third Way, has researched the politics surrounding transgender rights. However, it wasn’t until last December that she had reason to use the term “genital check” in front of a Democratic legislator.
“I’ve done it many times now, with numerous legislators,” she stated. “Their faces squish up” when she does, she said.
Ms. Erickson was at the time meeting with Democratic legislators in an effort to prevent a Republican bill that would completely prohibit transgender athletes from competing in women’s sports. She felt that uncomfortable discussions were a required initial step in breaking out of the perceived paralysis surrounding the subject that had gripped many in and around Democratic politics.
Many Democratic politicians had decided to keep mum on the issue because they were caught in an ever-increasing divide between the views of the party’s liberal voters and advocacy groups on one side and the rest of the American population on the other. Surveys conducted by Ms Erickson and other agencies revealed this allowed the Republicans who spent millions of dollars in 2024 on ads criticizing Democrats on transgender rights, to influence voters’ perceptions of Democratic policy stances.
“What they thought in November was that Democrats believed there should be no rules,” Ms. Erickson stated. “That is a caricature of the right’s viewpoint.” Additionally, that is what they hear if you are afraid to express your stance.
The issue is symptomatic of the Democratic Party’s larger identity politics challenges as it analyzes its defeat in 2024. Many in the party think that regaining its position with voters requires accepting the party’s metamorphosis throughout the Obama and first Trump administrations, during which American liberals widely adopted what previously been vanguard on a variety of social and cultural concerns such as gender and race immigration and policing.
Democratic legislators in some districts have embraced stances that are even debated among their own voters, and this has grown more prevalent in recent years as a result of following the lead of liberal advocacy organizations.
This is especially true of transgender rights, where polls currently indicate majority support for some restrictions that activists have vehemently opposed and for which they have attempted to hold lawmakers accountable for their support.
Even among Democrats, support for restrictions is rising. In February, a Pew Research poll revealed that 45% of Democratic or Democratic-leaning adults supported legislation requiring transgender athletes to compete on teams that matched their gender at birth, a rise from 37% just three years prior. There has been a comparable increase in support among Democrats for limits on medical treatment for transgender minors who are transitioning and on toilet access for transgender individuals.
Republicans spent millions of dollars on frequently deceptive ads in Senate campaigns last year that took advantage of this divide by targeting vulnerable red- and purple-state incumbents, such as one that said Jon Tester of Montana had voted to permit “biological men to compete against girls in sports” “Kamala Harris is for they/them. Donald Trump is for you,” the ad’s tagline, was used by the Trump campaign to portray Vice President Kamala Harris as out of touch.
Despite the fact that there is no evidence that transgender rights were a major concern for the majority of voters in 2024, Democratic strategists think these assaults did have an effect. According to Blueprint, a Democratic polling initiative conducted after the election, 67% of swing voters who switched over to Mr. Trump in the last weeks of the campaign felt that Democrats were “too focused on identity politics.”
Greg Schultz, the national campaign manager for former President Joseph R. Biden’s primary run in 2020, stated, “We try so hard to represent everybody, we alienate everybody.”
The discussion over the party’s direction has been most evident since November in relation to transgender athletes’ involvement in high school and collegiate sports. The Republicans have pushed their advantage in that area, passing broad restrictions via executive order—as Mr. Trump did in February—and via state-level legislation, from the White House to state legislatures. The Supreme Court this month decided to consider two cases contesting state restrictions, which have been enacted in twenty-seven states. However, recent polls reveal that a small majority of Americans support Mr. Trump’s approach to transgender concerns.
Democrats have opposed such kinds of bans at federal and state level. Since the election, only a few Democratic politicians, like Massachusetts Congressman Seth Moulton and California Governor Gavin Newsom, have publicly disagreed on the issue. Both of them have argued that the involvement of transgender athletes in girls’ and women’s sports poses legitimate questions of fairness, but they have been met with strong opposition and charges of political opportunism from within the party.
However, the National Center for LGBTQ Rights’ legal director, Shannon Minter, suggested a more lenient interpretation of their remarks as efforts to adapt to a changed political landscape.
I believe they attempted to convey that, Yeah we recognize there are genuine issues here which need to be addressed around fairness and let’s do that. It wasn’t delivered in the most graceful manner but not every statement will be perfect so we can do that, he said.
Others have maintained that a significant factor in the issues faced by both Democrats and the transgender rights movement is the reaction: Democratic politicians have been unable to connect with voters because they are afraid of offending supporters.
“We haven’t been pragmatic for the past 10 or so years,” stated Mara Keisling, the creator of the National Center for Transgender. “And that’s killing us,” said the equality.
Disclosing Vulnerability
In 2024, Republican candidates and independent organizations spent more than $200 million on campaign ads that targeted Democratic Senate candidates in tight contests, such as Mr. Tester in Montana and Sherrod Brown in Ohio, as well as Kamala Harris, with concerns about transgender rights.
Such campaigns have frequently been criticized by Democrats as political manipulation of a topic that has little bearing on the lives of the majority of voters: prior to Mr. Trump’s executive order, the number of transgender athletes participating in collegiate sports throughout the nation was estimated to be between 10 and 40. However, some members of the party characterized the flood of advertisements in 2024 as truly damaging, exposing the Democrats’ weakness on the subject.
Polling done soon after the election gives some members of the party cause to believe that a path forward is starting to emerge. Voters in the eight states where Republicans spent a lot of money on ads with transgender themes were polled by Change Research, a progressive public opinion organization. The poll found that 55% of those voters believed that local schools and sports organizations, not politicians, should regulate the participation of transgender athletes in sports.
The language of the Republican legislation to prohibit transgender athletes from participating in collegiate women’s sports was mirrored by Senate Democrats in March, when they unanimously opposed it. (Although the measure, which had previously passed the House, failed in the Senate, its text was largely similar to Mr. Trump’s February executive order.)
The Nevada senator who was the target of the Republican advertisements in the fall, Jacky Rosen, stated to Axios at the time that “everyone deserves a level playing field.” “However, those choices must be made by the governing bodies — the parents, the coaches, the N.C.A.A.,” she stated.
The Democratic candidate in this year’s Virginia governor’s race, former congresswoman Abigail Spanberger, has made a similar case for allowing schools and athletic organizations to handle sports policy, where gender politics have played an unusually significant role in recent elections. “It’s a ‘complicated issue,’” she stated in late June during a campaign stop in Martinsville, Va., continuing, “I think it depends on the sport, depends on the kids.”
However, Ms. Erickson contends that in the end, voters won’t be persuaded by referring the matter to other authorities. In order for Democrats to advance the politics surrounding transgender athletes, she thinks they need to address the substance of the prohibitions. For example, a suggested state ban in Ohio in 2022 came under criticism for requiring physical examinations of athletes in order to establish their sex—language that was later taken out but that some Democratic opponents of the prohibition have used this year to argue for the possibility that such legislation may be intrusive in practice.
“People will turn against it if you can convince them that this will have an effect on every girl who wants to play sports, or every girl who wants to play sports who doesn’t resemble a stereotypical feminine girl,” she said.
The battle over transgender rights, according to some members of the party, exposes underlying weaknesses in the Democratic platform. Numerous Democratic strategists admitted in interviews that the Trump campaign advertisement, which emphasized Ms. Harris’s prior support for transgender athletes’ involvement in women’s sports and for the government funding of gender-reassignment surgery for federal prisoners, was successful.
The “they/them” commercial, in contrast to many Republican ads about identity politics that play to voters’ concerns about social change, portrayed transgender people as just the most recent on a long list of groups that had received special attention from the Democrats and urged viewers to see that attention as coming at their expense.
“It was less an anti-trans assault and more a way to tap into something that people were feeling: ‘You’re fighting for everyone else other than me,'” said Alyssa Cass, Blueprint’s head strategist.
