Over the last five years, nobody has done more to turn anti-transgender politics into the Republican Party’s brand than Florida Governor Ron DeSantis. Under him, Florida became one of the worst states in the country for transgender people, with arrests of transgender people in bathrooms, a law forcing transgender teachers to misgender themselves in the classroom, and attacks on drag venues across the state. It is in this context that DeSantis took the podium in Tallahassee on Wednesday to assess an election that delivered the biggest Democratic victory since Watergate, and declared that the “hundreds of millions of dollars” Republicans spent on anti-transgender ads were “not the issue motivating voters,” a lesson that appears to be setting in among Republican consultants after nearly $200 million was spent on ads targeting transgender people.
“This is close to an extinction-level event for Republicans in many parts of the country,” Desantis said in his speech to reporters. He later continued: “I knew Republicans were in trouble when I was reading an overview about what they were running ads on, and they’re spending hundreds of millions on transgender ads… That was not the issue motivating voters, and it was kind of an attempt to just scare Republicans to vote.”
Watch this stunning moment here:
He’s not wrong in his assessment. AdImpact data shows Republican anti-transgender TV ads totaled about $183 million through late October, and that money bought the party that pushed them its worst midterm loss in decades. Texas went blue, Georgia elected a Democratic governor, and even in Mississippi, where anti-trans ads were commonplace, they failed to motivate voters, leaving Democrat Scott Colom, who supports trans youth care, with a razor-thin lead in the U.S. Senate race as the count continues. If you were a Republican consultant who believed that campaigning against transgender people would earn you an easy victory over your Democratic opponent, last night should shatter that belief. Meanwhile, Democrats who ran on pro-transgender policy won in places like Tennessee, where Victoria Broderick leads eight-term incumbent Scott DesJarlais by 280 votes in a seat that was never supposed to be competitive and will likely win; Pennsylvania’s 8th District, where Paige Cognetti picked up a Republican seat while allied organizations ran pro-transgender ads; and Alabama, where Allison Montgomery, a transgender Democrat, flipped a House seat Republicans had won by 16 points. Anti-transgender politics failed, and it failed stunningly.
There were signs that this was going to happen. One year ago in Virginia, Winsome Earle-Sears saturated the airwaves with anti-transgender ads, with 57% of Republican ad spending in the race going to attacks on transgender people. Polls showed voters ranked the issue at the bottom of their concerns and preferred Spanberger’s approach to it by double digits. Democrats expanded their House of Delegates majority to 64 seats, and Gov. Abigail Spanberger won by 15 points. Then, during this election, the American Principles Project, the organization that has been pushing anti-trans attack ads since 2016, circulated a memo warning that running on anti-trans policy “may not be sufficient” for Republicans to win the 2026 midterms. And in Texas, former House Speaker Dade Phelan, a Republican, said “we’re still running transgender ads. It’s just not resonating,” and that “nothing’s moved the needle here in Texas.” Now, all of these prognosticators turned out to be correct: anti-transgender ads failed, and even DeSantis says so.
It was not a unanimous victory for transgender people. Sports ban ballot measures are running ahead in Washington, Colorado and Arizona, though in Washington, a forced outing measure appears to be trailing as of Wednesday morning. And many Democrats who capitulated on transgender issues won their elections, though this is hardly surprising given that nearly every Democrat in a contested race won across the country. But the ballot measures can and likely will be challenged in liberal-leaning state courts, where they could be defeated, and anti-transgender Democrats will have their influence heavily diluted by a Congress that did not run their playbook. Meanwhile, Republicans can never again count on an anti-trans ad blitz for a victory, something that should give all transgender people cause for celebration.
Moving forward, it remains to be seen how political analysts will treat this election, but a narrative is already emerging: anti-transgender politics does not work, and it costs a candidate nothing to support transgender people. In fact, simply by standing up for transgender people, a Democrat may be able to bait an opponent into pouring money into anti-transgender ads instead of talking about the issues voters care about. This brand of politics has become a black hole for the Republican Party, and even with DeSantis acknowledging it, it is uncertain that Republicans can stop themselves from running the playbook again.
“I knew Republicans were in trouble when they were running ads on and spending hundreds of millions of dollars across the country on transgender ads”
Yeah . . . that's really goddamn rich to hear coming from him!
Thank you for the reporting, Mrs. Reed.
After FA, they clearly are now in the FO stage.