Bluesky

Last week, the conservative group American Principles Project sent a memo to GOP candidates running in the 2026 midterms about one of the party’s biggest attack issues this cycle: transgender rights. In the memo, the APP, which focuses its political work heavily around anti-trans themes, assured these candidates that the transphobic advertisements and messaging it has sold them on for nearly a decade “can still be used to move persuadable voters.”

But then the group pivoted. It warned that this hate-filled strategy on its own “may not be sufficient” without a “compelling message on the economy,” an issue that ranks as the top priority for voters—unlike trans people and our healthcare, which typically have much lower saliency.

One memo from one group may not seem that important. But APP has spent years convincing Republican campaigns and donors about the potency of anti-transgender attacks against Democrats. This is despite the fact that transphobia-themed attacks have failed to seal the deal in competitive statewide and House races in 2019, 2020, 2022, 2023, and 2025. Their apparent success in 2024 was more likely a fluke, deployed against a weakened candidate on a shortened timeframe with a deflated base trying to carry the baggage of another president whose popularity was sunk by the rising cost of living.

The group’s warnings are also bearing out in the polls thus far this year; even after heavily investing in anti-trans advertising in key midterm races across the country—and getting substantial outside assistance from figures like Elon Musk, whose super PAC is spending $100 million in advertisements almost solely focused on demonizing trans people in many of these races—Republicans stand a real chance of losing the House and potentially even the Senate.

While it makes meek references to “economic populism” to ward off voters’ increasing embrace of “the false promise of socialism,” APP seemingly knows very well that an obsessive focus on niche cultural grievances is not enough to blind voters to the reality of the economy most Americans are enduring.

Yet, while the electoral threat that anti-trans attacks pose to Democrats is overstated, where this strategy has been successful is in rendering transgender people as politically isolated as we’ve ever been—decreasing the public’s support for our legal and social equality and foregrounding the most emotional issues (like the rights of the minuscule number of transgender athletes) over the more profound, material forces that actually shape trans people’s daily lives, namely access to affordable healthcare, safe schools, jobs free of discrimination, and the ability to go about our lives with dignity.

Trans people in battleground states must now live out another election cycle knowing that their friends, family, coworkers, and neighbors are being flooded with agitprop designed to dehumanize us. Some of the ads being paid for by Musk in states like Texas and Ohio present such a cartoonish depiction of transgender life or activism that they’ve literally used AI to generate caricatures of trans women who don’t exist.

As I said, real-life trans people mostly have the same day-to-day concerns about their lives as any other Americans. But the core thesis of Trumpism is one of forced scarcity—the belief that your struggle and suffering must be the fault of someone different from you. It proposes that if we can simply make trans people—or immigrants or Muslims or Black people or women—suffer, then the lives of “everyday” (read straight, cis, white) people will surely improve. But as APP’s memo suggests, that promise is collapsing in real time, presenting an opportunity for Democrats to turn the tables on anti-transgender attacks in the context of Trump’s many broken promises.

What Trump assured the American people in 2024 is that their dissatisfaction with the Biden administration was because Biden and Kamala Harris were either too old, too incompetent, or too focused on transgender people and our rights. But now that Donald Trump is president, he has banned trans athletes, gone after doctors and hospitals that provide trans healthcare, purged trans people from the military and any mention of them from much of the federal government, and done everything in his power to deny trans people and our families any modicum of dignity or autonomy over our own lives. Has that lowered your rent? Has that put gas in your car? Has the ritual humiliation and dehumanization of transgender people helped give your children a brighter future?

Some Democrats are still embracing a (likely doomed) effort to negate the anti-trans attack ads through some combination of retreat and triangulation. I understand that it is generally a mistake to expect politicians to be brave. Many strategists and advisers would suggest pols aren’t furthering the political isolation of trans people with these triangulations but simply reflecting public opinion—and that an unreliable ally is better for trans people than a reliable enemy.

But there is another option between the retreat of some candidates this year and the silence these attacks often met in past election cycles. As APP makes clear, the goal of these ads is carving a division between the interests of the broader public and the interests of transgender people ourselves. But Trump, Musk, APP, and their allies on the campaign trail have shown that our fates and interests have never been more intertwined, with the country being robbed and immiserated by the same people harboring a dangerous obsession with the rights and lives of less than 1 percent of the population. They know this isn’t working; all we need to do is connect the dots for everyone else.