A new ad from the campaign of former President Donald Trump highlighting Vice President Kamala Harris’s support for taxpayer-funded transgender surgeries for illegal immigrants and prisoners was so eye-opening that even one of Harris’s fans had to give it credit.
Podcaster Charlamagne Tha God said during a segment of his show this week that the ad stood out to him while he was watching football games over the weekend.
“When you hear the narrator say Kamala supports taxpayer-funded sex changes for prisoners, that one line, I was like, ‘Hell no, I don’t want my taxpayer dollars going to that.’ That ad was effective,” he said.
The ad itself is pretty remarkable. It highlights a questionnaire from the American Civil Liberties Union that Harris filled out while running for president in 2019, in which she pledged to support the use of taxpayer funds for sex-change surgeries for illegal immigrants and prisoners. The document was largely forgotten until it was resurfaced by CNN in early September. Trump then raised the matter on the debate stage, much to the surprise of legacy media outlets, which were forced to admit that the vice president had, in fact, supported it.
The ad finishes with a brutal tagline: “Kamala is for they/them. President Trump is for you.”
Embracing the transgender topic in ads is a new development for the Trump campaign, which has largely eschewed hot-button culture war topics, instead focusing on inflation, border security and illegal immigration, and crime. And there was sound logic for that decision. Polling consistently shows voters, by and large, trust Trump to handle those issues better than his Democratic opponent, who is plagued by her association with the administration that created those problems in the first place.
Trump has avoided the cultural issues, and Democratic candidates up and down the ballot and coast to coast have turned abortion into their preeminent issue. But while recent elections and polling have consistently shown that abortion is an electoral liability for Republicans, the Democratic Party has its own problems with unpopular social policy positions.
The ad detailing Harris’s support for taxpayer-funded sex changes for illegal immigrants and prisoners barely scratches the surface of the outrageously unpopular socially liberal agenda proposed by the Democratic Party.
For instance, among the most radical policy goals of the party is ensuring that children under 18 are able to undergo life-changing sex-change procedures before they are legally allowed to vote, drink, or even consent to sex. The policy is delineated in the party’s platform adopted at this year’s Democratic National Convention, at which Harris and her running mate, Gov. Tim Walz (D-MN), were nominated to lead the party into the presidential election in November.
“Democrats will vigorously oppose state and federal bans on gender-affirming healthcare and respect the role of parents, families, and doctors — not politicians — in making healthcare decisions,” the platform says.
Needless to say, the policy is abysmally unpopular with voters. A 2023 NPR-Marist poll found that only 31% of voters believe that children should be able to undergo such procedures if parental consent is provided. Sixty-eight percent said children should not be able to undergo the procedures at all, putting the Democratic Party’s position squarely at odds with a supermajority of the electorate.
Such a position, given its widespread unpopularity, would seem to be a slam dunk to highlight on the campaign trail. But Republicans and the Trump campaign, with the exception of the one recent ad, have largely failed to highlight the willingness of their opponents to embrace whatever extreme policy is being championed by the Human Rights Campaign and other liberal social policy shops. Although Trump himself has released a laundry list of policy videos on his website detailing his plans to address issues such as parental rights and transgender participation in sports, the campaign has mostly ignored the issues in its public messaging.
At the same time, abortion is front and center in nearly every Democratic Party campaign ad as the party attempts to replicate the playbook that helped it secure better-than-expected results in the 2022 midterm elections, which took place five months after Roe v. Wade was overturned by the Supreme Court.
Terry Schilling, the president of the American Principles Project, a political action committee that backs socially conservative candidates, fears that by ignoring culture war issues on the campaign trail, Republicans are missing an enormous opportunity to galvanize their own base while forcing Democratic candidates to defend unpopular positions or risk alienating their base.
“Republicans should be hammering Democrats nonstop on the Left’s insane culture war. Even more than the economy and crime,” he told me. “Reasonable people can disagree on tax rates and budget priorities — but putting men in women’s sports? Giving kids sex-change procedures? Indoctrinating kids into racial and gender ideology while they struggle with math and reading? These are clear winners for Republicans, and Democrats will lose their base if they capitulate on these issues.”
Schilling very well may have a point. When Republican candidates home in on particular culture war issues on which their position is supported by a supermajority of the electorate, they win.
In 2021, Republican Glenn Youngkin defeated Democrat Terry McAuliffe to become governor of Virginia in an election widely considered an upset. In the closing weeks of the campaign, education and parental rights issues dominated Republican messaging, especially after McAuliffe committed an unforced error during a debate when he said he didn’t believe that “parents should be telling schools what they should teach.” Youngkin immediately turned the quote into his defining campaign ad in the closing weeks of the election.
A year later, Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL) passed a bill banning classroom instruction on gender identity and sexual orientation in early grades, prohibiting pornographic content in public schools, and banning the teaching of divisive concepts such as critical race theory.
That November, despite a tidal wave of national media criticism and vows from the White House that the state could face legal consequences for passing the bills, DeSantis cruised to a 20-point reelection victory, a far cry from the minuscule margin that won him his first term in 2018. But despite the position’s widespread unpopularity, the Democratic Party has stuck to its line that Republicans are banning books and “politicizing our classrooms.”
But rather than capitalize on yet another issue that is political kryptonite for Democrats, Republicans have all but ignored it. After two cycles of education-heavy messaging, in 2024, the issue has all but disappeared from the campaign trail. Parental rights are rarely discussed, and no Democratic candidate has been forced to answer for his support for pornographic material in schools or sex-change procedures for children.
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One of the only hints of education-related messaging is in Texas, where the Truth and Courage PAC, a political action committee supporting the reelection bid of Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX), is airing an ad blasting Rep. Colin Allred (D-TX) for opposing a bill that would have banned biological men from competing in women’s sports programs. Polling has shown that Allred’s position is in line with about a quarter of the national electorate, a number that is likely even lower in Texas.
With five weeks left until Election Day, polling is showing that neither party has much of an upper hand in the presidential election or in the downballot races for the House of Representatives and the Senate. Republicans have nothing to lose and everything to gain by reminding voters that another Democratic administration will mean another four years of the most extreme liberal social policy that, in many cases, is targeted at their children.