Opinion: This Week's Gallup Poll Shows Why Dems Shouldn't Fear Anti-Trans Ads
Voters rank transgender issues as the least important to their vote among a list of 22 issues. Of those who rank it as very important, most are Democratic voters.
In the past month, nearly $100 million has been spent on anti-trans ads across the United States. Conservative super PACs have launched these campaigns in swing states, targeting vulnerable senators. Meanwhile, the Trump campaign is running a national anti-trans ad during football games. However, recent polls and past election results cast doubt on the effectiveness of this strategy. Today, a Gallup poll confirmed that, similar to 2022 and 2023, voters rank transgender issues as the least important concern; Democrats should not be afraid of anti-transgender ads in swinging the election in 2024.
The poll asked voters to gauge the importance 22 issues to their vote. These included the economy, Supreme Court justices, taxes, education, Israel and Palestine, China, race relations, and more. Among the options was “transgender rights.” When asked about the importance of each issue, voters ranked transgender rights dead last, falling below concerns like climate change, race relations, the federal budget deficit, and China.
You can see the Gallup Poll chart of issues here:
The relative ranking of transgender rights compared to other issues voters care about stands in stark contrast to Republican spending targeting transgender people. Over the past month, Republican PACs have launched significant ad campaigns aimed at swing-state senators. The Senate Leadership Fund, a major conservative PAC, announced plans to spend $80 million in Ohio alone. The first ads released by the PAC targeted Senator Sherrod Brown for supporting gender-affirming care for trans youth. Similar ad campaigns followed in several other states, targeting Senator Jon Tester in Montana, Senator Tammy Baldwin in Wisconsin, and Senator Bob Casey in Pennsylvania, among others.
It is not just Senators who are being targeted by anti-trans advertisements. Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump’s campaign has launched its own massive ad buy across the United States targeting transgender people. Ads saying “Trump is for us, Kamala Harris is for they/them” are running alongside football games nationwide, including in safe Democratic states.
The latest Gallup poll confirms that these ads are not effective. While people may hold differing views on transgender rights—covering issues like driver's licenses, bathrooms, sports, health care, and more—the issue is not salient for the vast majority of Americans. Transgender people make up a small percentage of the general population, and issues relating to them are overshadowed by bread-and-butter concerns like the economy, democracy, education, and Supreme Court justices.
To make matters worse for Republicans running ads on this issue, voters who rank transgender rights as very important to their vote are not Republicans but primarily Democrats. In fact, twice as many Democratic voters consider transgender issues important to their vote. Among Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents, transgender rights rank higher than immigration, crime, taxes, and energy. For Republicans, however, transgender rights rank below nearly every other issue. The only issue ranked lower is climate change, something many Republican candidates don’t even believe in.
You can see the partisan breakdown of issue importance here:
These results are supported by years of polling and election data showing consistent trends. While responses on individual transgender issues can vary greatly depending on how the question is framed—such as "banning" gender-affirming care for youth (Americans oppose bans) versus "do you support or oppose" gender-affirming care for transgender youth—several constants have emerged across nearly every poll. Voters view the issue as unimportant, prefer the government to stay out of it, and politicians who focus negatively on it face backlash.
Similar dynamics are at play in elections as well. This isn’t the first time Republicans have targeted transgender people in their campaigns; it’s become a staple of their strategy when they feel desperate. The problem for Republicans is that, universally, turning to transgender issues in a general election is a gamble that rarely pays off. In Michigan's 2022 elections, Republican ad dollars flowed into anti-trans campaigns, and they lost the trifecta in the state. This led to the GOP state chair admitting that Republicans spent more money on anti-trans ads than on core economic issues, and blaming their loss on that decision. Similar patterns were seen in Wisconsin’s Supreme Court election, legislative races in Pennsylvania and Virginia, Georgia’s Herschel Walker vs. Raphael Warnock election, Andy Beshear’s reelection in Kentucky, and the 2023 losses of 70% of Moms for Liberty and Project 1776 school board candidates across the U.S.
Despite this, reports have emerged indicating that some Democratic strategists are shaken by the anti-trans ad blitz and are getting cold feet around anti-trans advertising. According to an NBC report on the ads, some Democratic strategists believe that transgender issues are a loser for Harris because voters “do not want their daughters competing against transgender athletes do not want to pay for gender-affirming surgery for criminals.”
Those same strategists would go on to say that “in all the polls, the trans stuff is bleak” and “It’s a killer ad.”
If these are the strategists Democrats are relying on in this election, then both the party and transgender people are in trouble. It reveals a fundamental misunderstanding of the polling on transgender rights and the political history of attacks on the community. If Democrats follow these strategists and backpedal on transgender rights, they risk alienating a significant portion of their base who considers the issue very important, all in pursuit of a topic that Republicans and Republican-leaning independents rank among the least important. And they would be doing this based on Republican ad spending that, historically, has proven to be nothing more than a paper tiger.
Anti-trans ads might not politically benefit Republicans, but anything that feeds this moral panic certainly doesn't make me feel safer.
Alway always always it's the shit establishment older Dems that have cold feet on this shit and have shit messaging. (It's why the messaging was good early on with Harris' campaign, but seems to be the bog standard and boring now, you likely had newer younger people running shit, before the establishment took over)