The results of the 2024 election show that the American people rejected far-left transgender ideology and the candidate who embraced these radical positions.
Though Kamala Harris tried to distance herself from her past support for tax-payer transgender surgeries for illegal immigrants and federal prisoners, Donald Trump and his campaign effectively used her remarks to show the American people how out of touch she was on this topic.
The Trump campaign zeroed in on the Left’s embrace of transgenderism, pouring millions into television ads that warned: “Kamala is for they/them. President Trump is for you.” Those ads didn’t have to do much heavy lifting: they quoted Kamala herself.
“Surgery, for prisoners, every transgender inmate in the prison system would have access,” the ad quotes the vice president saying.
Kamala is for they/them.
President Trump is for you. pic.twitter.com/Yk1KBgMH4f
— Trump War Room (@TrumpWarRoom) September 20, 2024
Those efforts were wildly successful. Even before the election, the ad’s success prompted a slew of legacy media stories on the Trump campaign’s strategy to use “anti-transgender” messaging, and how effective that strategy was.
Trump advisors told The Daily Wire that the messaging was reaching women, specifically suburban women, the same population that Democrats were targeting with aggressive abortion messaging. The Wall Street Journal predicted trans-identifying males in women’s sports would be the 2024 sleeper issue.
Activists like Terry Schilling and Penny Nance insisted that the Left had gone too far — and that women were going to go to the polls to vote against gender ideology.
According to Democratic testing results reviewed by the New York Times before the election, the “Kamala is for they/them” ad was both the Trump campaign’s most viewed and most effective ad. The Trump campaign aired the ad across the nation, including during football games.
One viewer in particular was impressed: popular podcast host Charlamagne Tha God, who saw the ad while watching football.
“Kamala supports taxpayer funded sex change surgeries for prisoners!” he exclaimed as he discussed the topic on air. “HELL NO I don’t want my taxpayer dollars going to that.”
The Trump campaign used that line as well, pushing out another ad that cites Charlamagne Tha God and his co-host condemning the far-left position. According to analysis by Harris’s top super PAC, Future Forward, the Charlamagne ad ended up being one of the Trump team’s most effective 30-second ads, the New York Times reported.
The publication reports that the Charlamagne ad “shifted the race 2.7 percentage points in Mr. Trump’s favor after viewers watched it.”
(Photo by Jason Mendez/Getty Images for ReedPop)
Trump messaged throughout his campaign that Harris and the Democrats were pushing dangerous ideology that Americans didn’t want. He argued repeatedly that the far-left policies the Democratic Party embraced were “crazy.” His assertions were based on polling, both internal and external, as The Daily Wire previously reported, showing that Americans don’t want these radical transgender policies.
These leftist activists and lawmakers, as Trump put it, are “crazy.”
“The sickos who are pushing sexual content in kindergartens, or providing puberty blockers to young children who have no idea what a puberty blocker is,” he said in 2022, drawing laughs from the crowd. “Neither do I, by the way. Neither do most of the people in the audience, as you smile.”
NEW: I spent the last few weeks speaking with activists and operatives close to Trump world about how his messaging on trans issues has evolved since 2020.
It’s the 2024 sleeper issue, I’m told — and Trump has paid attention. https://t.co/esxULndsYU
— Mary Margaret Olohan (@MaryMargOlohan) October 30, 2024
“Democrats want to have a debate about something that’s been totally obvious since the beginning of time,” Donald Trump Jr. told The Daily Wire last month. “But thankfully, common sense Americans know that boys play with boys and girls play with girls.”
In addition to his messaging on the campaign trail, Trump’s campaign platform promised to “cut federal funding for any school pushing critical race theory, radical gender ideology, and other inappropriate racial, sexual, or political content on our children.” The platform also promised to “keep men out of women’s sports.”
That messaging, and the messaging of Republican candidates across the country, caused at least three major Democrats to reverse their stances on men in women’s sports in the days ahead of the election, in Texas, Alaska, and Pennsylvania.
The Trump campaign ads on transgender issues were not only very effective with moderate suburban women, but also with black and Latino men, The New York Times reported.
Even former President Bill Clinton reportedly pushed Harris’s campaign to deny that they supported such radical stances.
“We have to answer it and say we won’t do it,” he told an associate, the Times reported. The publication reports that the Harris campaign told Clinton that the Trump trans ads were not really having an impact, and Clinton did not end up talking about the issue publicly.
Meanwhile, the Harris campaign was aware that they did, in fact, need to address these very effective attacks. The New York Times reports that the campaign debated internally, created ad responses, tested them, and found that they would not do well. So. they never ran the ads.
In the early hours of the morning on Wednesday, Trump took the stage in West Palm Beach to speak as the next president of the United States.
“The Democrats attaching themselves to the gender ideology bandwagon may be the stupidest thing the party has done in decades,” said Jay Richards, the director of the DeVos Center for Life, Religion, and Family at the Heritage Foundation. “The American public — left, right, and center — grows more opposed to it by the day. But the Biden administration and DNC spent four years pushing it into the nook and cranny of every government agency.”
Trump could have “played it safe” and avoided the topic, Richards said.
“Instead, he made gender madness a centerpiece of his campaign, especially in the closing weeks,” he argued. “It should now be obvious that embracing gender ideology is not just bad policy that leads to toxic medicine. It’s a huge political liability. Let’s hope some Democrats have learned their lesson. If not, then they’re giving Republicans a giant club to clobber them with.”
American Principles Project President Terry Schilling, whose organization poured over $18 million into ads highlighting Democratic extremism on this topic, argues it was Democrats themselves who dug their own grave.
“It’s the culture, stupid. Yes, the economic messaging and environment helped. Yes, the Democrats’ embrace of lawlessness helped. But those things were there in 2020 and 2022,” Schilling argued.
“Democrats transed children in school and insisted on taxpayer-funded sex change procedures,” he said. “They put men in women’s sports and private spaces. They put tampons in boys’ bathrooms. They classified parents as domestic terrorists. They put 72-year-old grandmas in jail for praying at abortion clinics. They lost the Catholic vote in the key swing states by enormous margins — all due to their cultural extremism. It might have been ‘the economy, stupid’ in the 1990s, but in 2024 it was obviously the culture. Stupid.”
