Kamala Harris has stalled a bit in some polls. An NBC poll released Monday showed her losing the five-point edge she had over Donald Trump in September, putting the race at 48–48. That’s just one poll, so who knows. Harris is still ahead nationally, holding steady with a lead of around two and a half points, which she’s had since the beginning of October. In the well-regarded Tipp Tracking Poll on Tuesday morning, she’s still up three. But the swing states are totally up for grabs.
There’s concern among Democrats (I mean, there’s always concern among Democrats, so take it for what it’s worth) that she’s lost a little momentum. The most common explanation is that she got a bump out of the butt-thumping she administered to Trump in the debate and that it faded, which was inevitable. Another reason offered is that as sitting vice president, she had to lie a bit low during the hurricanes, while Trump was not so constrained. Harris is back on the trail full-time with a sharper attack message, so maybe that will fix itself. Her rally Monday night in Erie, Pennsylvania, had every bit of the old late-July enthusiasm.
But we might consider the uncomfortable possibility that Trump’s ads, and one ad in particular, may have done Harris some harm. If you live in a swing state, or even if you don’t live in a swing state but watch some sports on weekends, you know the ad I mean because, according to the numbers, it’s the ad that you are by far most likely to have seen. Even I’ve seen it multiple times, living in navy-blue Maryland and watching stations based out of midnight-blue Washington, D.C. (and sometimes ESPN).
It’s called “Insane,” and it describes Harris’s support for gender-affirming surgery for prisoners in the California penal system. It focuses on one inmate, whom the ad does not name, who murdered a 33-year-old father of three in Los Angeles “during a drug- and alcohol-fueled rampage,” as the Los Angeles Times put it in 2017. The ad ends with a female narrator saying: “Kamala’s agenda is they/them. Not you.” Then comes Trump’s voice, affirming that he approved this message.
It’s certainly an attention-getter. And the Trump campaign must think it’s working for them, because the campaign has spent far more on that ad than any other. According to data compiled by AdImpact, in the last two weeks, team Trump has spent a little more than $17 million airing the ad. They’ve run it 24,000 times, and AdImpact estimates that it’s been seen nearly 550 million times. They’ve spent nearly $3 million running the ad in Pennsylvania, $2.4 million in North Carolina, $2.1 million in Georgia, and $1.7 million in Wisconsin.
There’s another ad on the same topic called “Access.” The campaign has spent $12 million on it over the last 27 days. AdImpact estimates that this ad has been seen more than 400 million times over that time. And there are four more ads on the theme that add up to around $970,000. AdImpact says the Trump campaign’s total advertising spending comes to $66 million, so these six ads account for nearly half of that total. (Similar ads are running in Senate and other races, so the real total of Republican spending on this issue is far greater.)
For comparison, nothing else comes particularly close to this $30 million anti-trans onslaught. Trump has spent $10.6 million on an ad attacking Bidenomics. There’s a Kamala-will-raise-your-taxes ad, on which the campaign has spent $8.8 million. There’s an ad attacking Harris’s old fracking position, on which they’ve spent $3.5 million, mostly in Pennsylvania and Michigan. The only other ad I noticed on which spending tops $1 million is an ad running in Michigan asserting that Harris wants to kill off gas-powered cars. Interestingly, there are very few ads focused on immigration from the Trump campaign. Some Trump-affiliated PACs are spending a few million on border-related ads, but mostly, Trump is dumping his eggs into the anti-trans basket.
So. Will it work? It’s sickening to think that this kind of hatred can win a presidential campaign. The ad is, in part, a “soft on crime” ad; the person in question is, after all, a murderer. But it’s a twofer, combining two right-wing targets, and at heart it’s really an anti-trans ad. Murderers are a dime a dozen in this violent, gun-laden country. But a murderer who got a sex-reassignment operation, paid for by California taxpayers? That’s what the ad wants its viewers to be enraged about.
Nothing in the ad is untrue. Harris is shown speaking at a 2019 candidate forum stating her position in support of this. Mind you, it’s a defensible position, from both a constitutional and a medical point of view. Under the Eighth Amendment, prisons are responsible for inmates’ health care needs. In recent years, courts have upheld transgender prisoners’ right to gender-affirming care. In 2022, a federal judge in southern Illinois for the first time ordered the Federal Bureau of Prisons to allow sexual-reassignment surgery for a transgender inmate. At the state level, it shouldn’t shock us that California has been at the leading edge of these efforts. Here’s a detailed analysis from FactCheck.org that goes into that history and Harris’s position. In sum, she’s been supportive, including in the case emphasized in the Trump ad.
Harris hasn’t addressed the matter this year. The New York Times did a big story on this topic, for which the campaign offered no comment. But we just learned that on Wednesday, she’s going to be sitting down with Fox News’s Bret Baier. And she’s in negotiations to sit with Joe Rogan. She should be prepared for such a question.
I hope that after saying whatever she feels she needs to say about how this might make some people react emotionally, she points to the science and the court decisions that justify this course of action. I hope she says that beyond this narrow issue, transgender people deserve to be treated with tolerance and decency, and they should possess the legal rights that all of us have.
I hope she then turns the tables on Baier, but really on Trump, by pointing out that all he has is hatred. Hatred of migrants. Hatred of transgender people. Hatred of “vermin.” Hatred of the “radical leftists” who, as he said Sunday, should be dealt with militarily on Election Day. Hatred of legal immigrants he falsely accused of eating cats and dogs. And she should then pivot to the future and the things voters actually care about.
Despite what you might reflexively think, and despite what many centrist Democrats say, transphobia has generally not been a winning issue for Republicans. Joshua A. Cohen wrote a long analysis of this history on Substack in March 2023. Going back to North Carolina and the infamous “bathroom bill” in 2012, which cost that state some $4 billion in business, transphobia has almost always been an electoral loser. In Kentucky—Kentucky!—in 2019, Republicans tried to make trans athletes’ participation in high school sports a central aspect of their attacks on Democratic Governor Andy Beshear. But Beshear won—narrowly, but he won. And he didn’t backpedal. In June (i.e., Pride Month) of that election year, he posted on Facebook: “Tonight’s Kentuckiana Pride Foundation parade kicks off Louisville’s #Pride weekend—I want to wish everyone in the LGBTQ+ community a happy Pride. As governor, I’ll always stand up for equality.”
It’s not necessarily that people overwhelmingly back trans rights, as Cohen notes. Rather, it’s that for most people, it’s just not a voting issue. So maybe these ads aren’t doing the damage the Trump people think they’re doing. Or maybe they do elicit a strong emotional response in the moment, but after people walk away from them, the message doesn’t stick with them, and it isn’t something they’re going to carry into the voting booth.
Interestingly, Cohen writes that Trump didn’t run this kind of campaign in 2020. Don Jr. egged him toward it, but he demurred. So this is yet another sign that, as bad as Trump was in 2016 and 2020, he’s worse now. It would be beyond delicious to see this $30 million (and counting) gamble on hate fail.
