Two weeks before the election, I was in Charlotte, North Carolina on a soccer trip with my older son. Because I am a giant political nerd, I watched a LOT of TV to see what ads the two sides in the presidential race were running.
And the ad I saw FAR more than any other was this one:
The ad featured a 2019 clip of Harris saying “every transgender inmate in the prison system would have access” to surgeries using tax-payer dollars. And it ended with this devastating tagline: “Kamala is for they/them. President Trump is for you”
I remember thinking — and even talking to Chuck Todd about — how odd this seemed to me. In an election about the economy, immigration and abortion, Donald Trump was running ads about trans stuff in the final weeks of the campaign.
It turns out that Trump (and his campaign) knew better than I did. This, from the New York Times, is eye-opening (bolding is mine):
So [the Trump campaign] poured still more money into the ads, running them during football games, which prompted Charlamagne Tha God, the host of the Breakfast Club, a popular show among Black listeners, to express exasperation — and his on-air complaints gave the Trump team fodder for yet another commercial. The Charlamagne ad ranked as one of the Trump team’s most effective 30-second spots, according to an analysis by Future Forward, Ms. Harris’s leading super PAC. It shifted the race 2.7 percentage points in Mr. Trump’s favor after viewers watched it.
The anti-trans ads cut to the core of the Trump argument: that Ms. Harris was “dangerously liberal” — the exact vulnerability her team was most worried about. The ads were effective with Black and Latino men, according to the Trump team, but also with moderate suburban white women who might be concerned about transgender athletes in girls’ sports.
Those were the same suburban women Ms. Harris was trying to mobilize with ads about abortion.
Democrats struggled to respond. At one point, former President Bill Clinton told an associate, “We have to answer it and say we won’t do it.” He even raised the issue in a conversation with the campaign and was told the Trump ads were not necessarily having an impact, according to two people familiar with his conversations. He never broached the topic publicly.
I mean, wow.
What’s the lesson? That lots and lots of swing voters associate the Democratic brand with woke-ism run wild, with liberal views that are FAR out of step with how they see the world.
That is a major problem for Democrats going forward — especially because their base is vehement that to back away from talking about, say, trans rights is a moral not just a political failing.
To be continued…
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The Morning: This one ad may have won Donald Trump the election