No, Democrats Don't Lose Elections Because They're Not Anti-Trans Enough
Debunking convenient narratives
Mainstream Democrats apparently put a lot of stock into Matt Yglesias’s opinions. This is curious because Yglesias himself has no real experience winning elections. He’s punditry’s version of a backseat driver or someone with an impressive fantasy football team.
Yglesias’s background — high school at Manhattan’s Dalton School and collage at Harvard — hardly provides him with useful any insight into the rural, working-class voters of any race who have turned away from Democrats over the years. No, Yglesias usually offers poll-based, focus-grouped recommendations for Democrats that frankly come across as purely transactional, if not slightly sociopathic. The late Charlie Kirk, for instance, seemed to genuinely believe in the positions he advanced, public opinion be damned. I don’t think Kirk “practiced politics the right way” but he did work to shape public opinion according to his regressive beliefs. Yglesias insists the one simple trick to electoral success is for Democrats to simply take whatever position on whatever issue is popular at the moment. That’s not advocacy or leadership. It’s filling the role of the subservient mean girl in a teen drama.
Yglesias frequently laments that Democrats have wasted political capital supporting trans rights, which he mostly considers a losing proposition. Last week, he criticized a New Republic piece that argued that Donald Trump won mostly because many voters who’d backed Joe Biden in 2020 simply stayed home. (I personally agree that effective persuasion doesn’t just flip reliable voters but also convinces less reliable ones to come out for you.) Jenifer Fernandez Ancona, a co-founder and vice president of Way to Win, pointed out voters didn’t sit out the election or flip to Trump solely because of the party’s position on trans rights. They wanted a stronger economic message from Democrats, and Trump’s anti-trans ads suggested that Kamala Harris and her party cared more about trans rights than improving economic conditions for everyone. .
As an example, voters surveyed by Way to Win said that Harris’s campaign was mostly concerned with trans issues. In reality, it wasn’t a big part of her campaign, Fernandez Ancona said. But trans issues played a starring role in ads from the opposition.
Ancona’s position is hardly wishful thinking. The Trump administration has rained hell on trans people since assuming power. There is no act sadistic enough for his thugs: During the shutdown, the Trump administration took the time to alter the official photo for Adm. Rachel Levine, who served for four years as Biden’s assistant secretary for health. It now lists her previous name, from before her transition. This petty cruelty hasn’t helped Trump’s approval rating, which is slightly below syphilis and dropping further by the day. He’s effectively marginalizing trans people but voters aren’t exactly throwing him a parade.
However, Yglesias not only doesn’t acknowledge this reality, he shows his hand when he argues that it wasn’t enough that Harris and Democrats didn’t actively campaign on a trans girl in every sport.
“It’s of course true that Dems aren’t crazy enough to campaign on this but they DO prioritize it,” Yglesias posted on social media. “How do I know? Because they stick with it nearly uniformly in the face of overwhelming public opposition, which would be a weird thing to do about an issue you don’t [think] is important.”
So, it seems as if Yglesias thinks Harris should’ve countered Trump’s gross anti-trans ads with some anti-trans ads of her own. Democrats might not have an economic message that was breaking through, but at least this way, they could both equally revile a vulnerable minority group.
This is both morally bankrupt and politically ridiculous. It’s not even a relevant Sophie’s Choice: Abandon trans people and keep Trump out of office. No, it’s just abandon trans people — including children — and still lose because voters thought eggs were too expensive.
Yglesias shared polling from Gallup that shows that 69 percent of U.S. adults (90 percent of Republicans, 72 percent of independents, and 41 percent of Democrats) believe “transgender athletes should only be allowed to play on sports teams that match their birth gender,” and that 66 percent of U.S. adults (89 percent of Republicans, 66 percent of independents, and 38 percent of Democrats) believe “people should be required to list their birth sex on government documents such as driver’s licenses of passports.”
The photo ID statistic clearly demonstrates that the supposed “trans backlash” has nothing at all to do with legitimate concerns about perceived “fairness” in women’s sports or women’s “safety” in public bathrooms. Someone responded that they didn’t see the connection between an individual’s personal government documents and participation in women’s sports. That’s perhaps willfully naive. The connection is obvious: This is all about eliminating trans people from public life.
I should note that an overwhelming majority of Democratic voters hold pro-trans positions on the two surveyed issues. I’d add that Gallup polling also shows that “a majority of Americans have an appetite for stricter gun laws in the U.S., and that includes an assault weapons ban.” Republicans however remain more loyal to their guns than many mainstream Democrats remained to trans people after the 2024 election. No Republican with eyes on the White House has appeared on a left-wing podcast and discussed their support for an assault weapons ban.
Yglesias doesn’t actually refute Ancona’s data-driven assertion that trans rights weren’t a decisive issue for voters. He just thinks Democrats shouldn’t bother defending trans people or even waste time trying to persuade voters, which is how most civil rights positions have been advanced. He notes that Barack Obama and Democrats opposed marriage equality in 2008, but he ignores that pro-gay groups were in ongoing persuasion mode. Public opinion didn’t magically change without any effort or mild political risk.
Sometimes, posts from Democratic House Rep. Sarah McBride will turn up in my social media feed. She rarely talks about her trans identity, which both disappoints many trans activists and fails to satisfy most anti-trans bigots. The latter will leave transphobic comments without any prompting. They needlessly misgender her. They call her by a name that she has never used as an elected official. They “helpfully” remind her to have her prostate checked.
These are terrible people who don’t give a damn about “women’s sports” and “women’s rights” — the latter would seem obvious from the Trump administration’s overtly misogynistic positions. I personally think it’s a winning political issue to side with trans people over those whose lives are so small they spend their time cruising a trans women’s social media so they can post dehumanizing messages. And even if it weren’t, that’s the only moral position.
And the cherry on top is that 28 Democratic Senators voted to advance the gop's anti-trans bill last week, including Schumer, Klobachar, Blumenthal and Baldwin. With friends like these....
They lose elections due to lack of Dem leadership, GOP corruption of the electoral process, decades of GOP voter suppression and gerrymandering, the GOP ownership of America's "public" media, and failure to nominate candidates that represent the voter's interests.