Pro-Trump forces flood airwaves with ads attacking Harris over past transgender stances

(CNN) — Over the first half of October, former President Donald Trump and his allies poured more than $21 million into television ads attacking Vice President Kamala Harris over her past support of certain rights for transgender people – a message they have spread during nationally televised NFL games, college football broadcasts and in battleground states.

It’s a staggering sum to spend on a topic that most voters say isn’t a top priority for them this election. But Trump’s campaign is betting any voters still choosing between the two candidates can be swayed to take sides in a cultural fight that has torn apart state houses and school boards in recent years – one that has put tremendous focus on an incredibly small, marginalized group that already faces discrimination-based violence. Republicans in key Senate races have mirrored that messaging as part of a playbook painting Democrats as out of touch with most voters.

At the center of the ads are positions, first reported by CNN’s KFile last month, that Harris took as a candidate for president during the 2020 primary, when she supported taxpayer-funded gender-affirming care for detained immigrants and federal prisoners, as already required by federal law.

“Kamala’s agenda is they/them, not you,” says one ad, referring to the pronouns used by some transgender and non-binary individuals. The Trump campaign put nearly $14 million behind the ad in the first two weeks of the month.

Asked by Fox News’ Bret Baier on Wednesday about her current stance, Harris said she would follow the law, while alluding to a New York Times report that outlined the Bureau of Prisons provided gender-affirming services under the Trump administration. The Trump campaign disputed the report.

Even before launching his 2024 presidential campaign, Trump escalated his rhetoric against the LGBTQ community – specifically transgender Americans – in ways that he largely avoided in the lead up to his 2016 win and throughout his four years in Washington. At an appearance in July 2022, Trump voiced his opposition to transgender women participating in women’s athletics, marveling at the applause it generated and insisting his advisers had advocated against including it in his remarks.

“They said don’t do it,” Trump said. “And it gets the biggest hand. It’s crazy.”

Early in his latest White House bid, Trump vowed to punish hospitals that provide gender-affirming care to minors — a rare outcome that is typically pursued after counseling and other prescribed treatments. He would also target schools and teachers that inform children they could be “trapped in the wrong body,” his campaign website said. He has recently falsely claimed that schools are secretly sending children for gender-affirming surgeries.  And his riff on transgender women competing in sports still draws the loudest support at his rallies.

Until now, however, much of that rhetoric had been aimed at his supporters. So far in October, out of a total of about $66 million that the Trump campaign and allied outside groups spent on broadcast TV ads, roughly a third – $21 million – went to ads about “LGBTQ rights,” according to data from the campaign advertisement tracker AdImpact. Nearly all feature clips of Harris from four years ago expressing support for pro-transgender policies.

The ads outpaced nearly every other topic Republicans have put in advertisements trying to sway the public during a critical closing stretch of the race – ahead of crime, inflation and immigration, and behind only taxation. As pro-Trump advertisers have put more money behind ads attacking transgender policies, economic messaging has also been a consistent, though shifting, point of emphasis. In August, inflation was a top issue, referenced in nearly a quarter of GOP advertising by broadcast spending. But in the months since, as inflation has continued to slow, that’s been supplanted by other issues such as taxation, which has risen to the top issue in pro-Trump advertising in October.

The top ad from the Trump campaign in October so far is an attack that calls Harris’ support for laws requiring prisoners to be provided with medical care, including gender-affirming care, “insane.” Another similar ad from the Trump campaign, with more than $2 million behind it this month, echoes that line. “It’s hard to believe, but it’s true. Even the liberal media was shocked Kamala supports taxpayer-funded sex changes for prisoners and illegal aliens,” the ad says.

Harris’ campaign did not respond to a request for comment. But asked to respond to one of the Trump campaign’s ads during Wednesday’s Fox interview, Harris argued that Trump’s team was focused on an issue most voters care little about.

“I think he spent $20 million on those ads trying to create a sense of fear in the voters,” she said, “because he actually has no plan in this election that is about focusing on the needs of the American people.”

For months, Trump’s most conservative allies have urged the former president to make the issue a centerpiece of his outreach to undecided voters. They have argued, publicly and behind-the-scenes, that parents especially could be swayed by his opposition to transgender treatments for minors and that Democrats had grown increasingly uneasy defending their support of pro-transgender policies around athletics and children.

“Politics is part of culture, it’s not downstream,” said Terry Schilling, the president of one of those groups, American Principles Project. “And if you want to win on an issue, the campaigns have to be running on it.”

Groups fighting for transgender rights have seen these attacks before. Schilling’s group spent millions of dollars on advertising in Kentucky in 2022 attacking incumbent Democratic Gov. Andy Beshear over transgender policies. Beshear won reelection. Democrats also prevailed in Virginia the next year when Republican Gov. Glenn Youngkin tried to turn the statehouse red in part by advocating for parental rights – a phrase regularly deployed by those advocating for the removal of some media informing gender identity and sexuality and topics in schools or for more transparency if their child comes out in school. Virginians that year also elected the commonwealth’s first transgender state senator.

Rodrigo Heng-Lehtinen, executive director of the National Center for Transgender Equality, said Republicans were tapping into an unsuccessful playbook out of “desperation.”

“Truly, universally it didn’t work,” Heng-Lehtinen said. “Voters mostly don’t rank transgender issues high on their priority list.”

A recent Gallup survey of registered voters indeed found just 38% said a candidate’s position on “transgender rights” was “extremely” or “very” important to them, ranking last out of about 20 topics.

But American sentiment around transgender issues is mixed, with some polls suggesting more people side with Trump. A growing number of Americans are opposed to transgender athletes competing on teams that correspond to their gender identity, according to Gallup, including 67% of independent voters. And a slim majority, 51%, believe changing one’s gender is “morally wrong,” the poll found, an illustration of the deep divide.

Still, far fewer Americans think government should intervene in the matter, and only 34% of independents favor banning certain medical treatments.

Trump’s advisers, though, eventually came to believe that the former president wouldn’t risk alienating moderate voters who support LGBTQ rights if he focused his opposition on polices that affect children.

“The issue has defined the modern-day Democratic Party and is a major part of their party platform,” said Trump co-campaign manager Chris LaCivita. “They, however, have chosen not to make it part of their campaign. We decided to do it for them.”

Pro-Trump groups have followed his campaign’s lead. Preserve America – a leading super PAC that has received millions from megadonor Miriam Adelson – went up with a pair of spots earlier this month threading several key GOP attack lines together, referencing transgender stances along with concerns about inflation and immigration.

A Wisconsin voter featured in one of the ads called Harris’ past transgender positions “not just liberal, it’s insane.” Another spot running in the Badger State raising the same issue includes a voter who says, “Seriously. Have these people lost their mind?”

MAGA Inc., the super PAC that has spent the most money supporting Trump’s 2024 campaign, also launched an ad this month hammering Harris, echoing the Trump campaign ad almost exactly, saying, “Crazy liberal Kamala’s for they/them. President Trump is for you.”

Democrats in the presidential race have offered no defensive response. According to AdImpact tracking data, $0 in Democratic broadcast TV ad spending went to ads mentioning LGBTQ rights during the first two weeks of October.

Very few Democrats running for federal office have gone on the air in defense. Rep. Colin Allred – who’s trying to unseat Sen. Ted Cruz in Texas – became the first Senate candidate to do so when he produced a TV ad last week, in which he said, “I don’t want boys playing girls sports or any of this ridiculous stuff that Ted Cruz is saying.”

Days later, Ohio Sen. Sherrod Brown, also went up with an ad pushing back on the GOP attacks. “The truth is, in Ohio, this has already been banned. Sherrod Brown agrees with Governor DeWine. These decisions should be made by local sports leagues, not politicians,” Brown’s ad says.

The attacks that Allred and Brown have faced are reflective of the issue’s emergence in Senate campaigns in addition to the presidential race.

GOP campaigns and groups targeting the 10 races seeing the most advertising spent about 18% – $17.7 million – of their broadcast TV advertising budget on ads referencing LGBTQ rights during the first two weeks of October, which ranked third among all the issues referenced in their ads, according to AdImpact data.

In the race for the White House, Schilling said the silence from Democrats in the face of Trump’s advertising onslaught is telling.

“The beauty of this issue is Democrats are damned if they do or damned if they don’t,” Schilling said. “If they do what Allred is doing, they lose their base. If they double down on it, then they lose the voters in the middle and even a good portion of their base.”

But Heng-Lehtinen said he had “confidence” that Harris and other Democratic candidates will “do the right thing in supporting their transgender constituencies and their families.” He said his organization has worked in close collaboration with the Harris campaign, including for a “Trans Folks for Harris” virtual event when she replaced President Joe Biden as the nominee.

“The campaigns – whether Kamala Harris or these Senate races, Allred not withstanding – are not dignifying this with a response, which I think is wise,” Heng-Lehtinen said. “This is not the top issue of most voters. They are working to win the majority of American votes and therefore they’re running on issues that most Americans are concerned about.”

CNN’s Jennifer Agiesta, Alayna Treene, Kate Sullivan and Kristen Holmes contributed to this report.

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