In the 13 months since the Democratic Party reached its modern electoral low point in the 2024 Presidential election, a crowd of centrist Democratic consultants have proclaimed that they have a simple answer to the party’s woes: abandon support for transgender rights. “It’s what the polling says,” they insist while ignoring everything the polling says about the economy. “It’s just too extreme,” they say, as if that’s a normal way to frame a discussion of human rights.
Their theory – that by clawing back support for far-left beliefs like “trans people exist and deserve rights too,” the Democratic Party will suddenly surge in popularity – has never been supported by much evidence. Both before and after the 2024 election, every bit of polling and analysis showed that the economy, immigration, and the state of democracy were the top issues for voters, usually followed by some combination of abortion rights, the federal debt and deficit, climate change, and a host of other issues. “Banning transgender people from sports,” or any other iteration of anti-trans panic, never cracked the top ten. I may not be a savvy centrist, but I’ve worked in politics for a decade and a half, and I’m not sure how cynically changing positions on a tertiary issue is supposed to improve the party’s fortunes.
Now, after a year of recriminations, special elections, and landslide victories in the two states which held general elections, their theory is not only unsupported by the available evidence, it’s directly contrary to it.
The gap between Harris’ loss and the first suggestion that the Party should throw trans people overboard to rectify it can be measured in milliseconds. With ballots still being counted, elected Democrats like Seth Moulton (D-MA) and Tom Suozzi (D-NY) were already joining odious centrist pundits like Matt Yglesias and talentless Party hacks like Adam Jentleson in suggesting abandoning millions of Americans to the whims of a movement which wants to see them destroyed.
“You can support transgender rights up and down all the categories where the issue comes up, or you can understand that there’s certain things that we just go too far on, that a big bulk of our population does not support,” then-Texas Democratic Party Chair Alberto Hinojosa said the day after the election.
“Week by week when that ad hit and stuck and we didn’t respond, I think that was the beginning of the end,” Democratic former governor of Pennsylvania, Ed Rendell, said of the Trump campaign’s ads attacking Harris for supporting trans rights (something, it’s worth noting, Harris virtually never discussed on the campaign trail).
Yglesias insisted that a stance in support of basic decency and the rights of all Americans was tantamount to “impos[ing] fringe values on an unwilling populace,” while Jentleson – whose greatest career accomplishment is briefly serving as chief of staff to the illustrious John Fetterman – described a pro-trans position as the product of “progressive interest groups that prevent Democrats from thinking clearly about how to win.”
In the absence of any tests to their theory, the anti-trans Democrats were able to present themselves as savvy and hard-nosed. “It’s what the electorate requires of us,” they’d say. “If we keep on this course, our candidates will be tarred with ads about their basic human decency and it will sink them.”
Then their theory was put to the test, and it failed.
There have been five Congressional special elections this year. In every single one of them, Democratic candidates have been targeted by Republican ads about their support for transgender rights, the exact scenario the centrists feared. And, in every single one of them, the trans-rights-supporting Democratic candidates have outperformed Kamala Harris’ 2024 results – a strong suggestion that support for transgender rights was nowhere close to being a determinative issue in the presidential race.
In Arizona’s 7th Congressional District, Adelita Grijalva ran with the full endorsement and support of trans rights groups, and fended off attacks on the topic from moderate primary challengers and then Republicans in the general election. She never wavered, and dedicated one of her first floor speeches in Congress, after finally being sworn-in, to the necessity of not abandoning support for LGBTQ rights. In the final tally, Grijalva won her seat by 40%. Harris won it by 22%.
In Tennessee’s 7th Congressional District – the district I grew up in during now-Sen. Marsha Blackburn’s tenure in the seat – Democratic candidate Aftyn Behn lost, but out-performed Harris by about 14 points while doing so. Predictably, the Atlantic then ran a piece blaming Behn’s loss on her support for transgender rights, arguing that she did not “appeal to swing voters.” Notably, the outlet chose not to make this argument about any of the year’s other special elections where Democratic candidates overperformed in red districts. They only chose to make the case in the one special election where it cannot be disproven: Tennessee’s lack of partisan voter registration makes any claim of who Behn did and did not appeal to a vibes-based assessment at best.
Regardless, special elections make for small, disparate datasets, the kind that it is difficult to draw solid conclusions from. Thankfully, two states also held full general elections this year, and the results were the same: despite millions of dollars spent on attack ads about support for transgender rights, Democrats dramatically overperformed expectations in both Virginia and New Jersey.
In New Jersey, Democratic gubernatorial candidate Mikie Sherrill was hit with advertisements claiming that she would push “LGBTQ propaganda” in schools. Despite the onslaught, Sherrill won the state by 14%, and the legislative Democrats down-ballot picked up five additional seats in the state legislature. In 2024, Harris won New Jersey by less than six points.
In Virginia, gubernatorial nominee Abigail Spanberger withstood more than $9 million worth of television ads about “boys in girls’ sports” and every other brand of anti-transgender hysteria. In the end, Spanberger won by 13.5% – by far the largest margin of victory a Democratic candidate for the seat has achieved this century. Further down the ballot, Democrats gained a staggering 13 new seats in the statehouse, despite facing their own waves of anti-trans advertising.
For those tempted to call a humane position on trans rights a “purity test,” it bears mentioning that neither Sherrill nor Spanberger are ideal lefty candidates. If there were any progressive purity tests in place, they likely would not have passed them. But they passed a more important test: they had the courage of their convictions, and they did not waver. When Republicans attempted to beat them by going after the supposed vulnerability of support for transgender rights, neither backed down, neither threw the trans community under the bus, and both won by striking margins of victory.
Ironically, both women are fairly centrist, but they refused to distance themselves from what many of their fellow centrists have defined as the “far-left” position of basic decency, and both reaped the rewards for standing their ground.
It also bears mentioning that neither Sherill nor Spanberger – nor most of the Democrats below them on their respective ballots – ran on transgender issues. Neither tokenized the trans community as the central topic of their campaign, and nor should they have. To tokenize is to otherize, not to welcome into the fold. In refusing to either abandon or tokenize the trans community, Sherrill and Spanberger did the most important thing those in power can do for any marginalized or targeted community: they refused to let them be separated from the pack.
When pressed on her support for trans rights, Spanberger routinely pivoted to protecting “the rights of every Virginian” – because transgender Virginians are not a prop or a weapon, they’re just Virginians.
One could argue that Sherrill and Spanberger could have been even more vocal about their support for the trans community, but it’s rarely good politics to have the conversation your opponent wants you to have. Sherrill’s and Spanberger’s Republican opponents wanted them to have a conversation which singled-out and isolated trans people; without abandoning the community or softening their positions, neither did so.
To the minimal credit of the centrist pundits and consultants advising amoral cowardice, it’s true that some polls – depending on phrasing, scope, and a whole host of other components – show only minority support for transgender rights. It is also true that the poll respondents of the 1960s had deeply negative views of Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Civil Rights Movement as a whole. Then, as now, the polls had no bearing on what was right.
Perhaps more to the point, though: then, as now, polls are a snapshot in time, and sustained political messaging changes them with time. By the 1980s, the same elected conservatives who decried MLK as a communist radical were voting to name a federal holiday in his honor – something which never would have happened if his political contemporaries had abandoned him and the movement he led at the first sign of bad polling. Instead of changing their positions, the proponents of civil rights stood their ground and changed reality.
The combination of polling and results shows us that, however regressive some people’s current views of the transgender community are, those views are not determining their behavior in the ballot box. History shows us that regressive views often change, but rarely when met with spinelessness.
The path forward for Democrats is not paved by cowardice. It does not consist of flinching at every poll or message-testing every position. It does not consist of imitating Alexandre Auguste Ledru-Rollin, who famously and probably apocryphally quipped, “There go my people. I must find out where they are going, so that I can lead them.”
The path forward for Democrats is paved by courage and conviction. It is paved by staking out positions and defending them, by letting voters know where they stand and then reliably standing there.
You wouldn’t know it from watching cable news, but both major American political parties are wildly and almost equally unpopular. According to Pew, 61% of Americans have a negative view of the Republican Party. 60% have a negative view of the Democratic Party. Only 4% say that our nation’s system of government is working well. Fewer than half of Americans believe that either party is honest.
In an environment like that, the road to political dominance does not come from optimized talking points or A/B tested email campaigns. It comes from being the first party to reestablish a reputation for reliability and honest dealing.
The same self-styled savvy centrists who suggested abandoning trans people for short-term gains – those steely-eyed professionals who insist they are just dealing with the facts, ma’am – would likely call this suggestion Pollyannaish. They would likely deride my theory that a good reputation can lead to political gains as naive and simplistic. They would say that it’s more complicated than that, that we have to triangulate, meet the voters where they are. They would dismiss it in favor of more serious ideas, like softening the party’s spine even further, or curling up into a little ball to ward off predators.
But they’re the ones who got us here in the first place, and it’s time we stopped caring what they think.
