Last week, as the war with Iran dragged into its seventh month, gas prices shot up to an average of $4.50 a gallon, and polling showed President Trump about twice as far underwater with American voters as he was at this point in 2018, Republican senators determined that the time had come to discuss the most pressing issue of the 2026 campaign: transgender athletes. “Girls’ sports are for girls. Boys’ sports are for boys,” Senator Marsha Blackburn said in a news conference.
With 32 days to go until the midterm elections, Republicans’ closing strategy is obvious: They’re going all-in on trans. (It seems to have worked for them before, after all. More on that in a minute.) In Texas, Republicans are running an unsettling AI-generated ad that shows the Democratic Senate candidate James Talarico dressed as Maria von Trapp and singing about girls with mustaches. A spot in Iowa accuses the Senate candidate Josh Turek of supporting “sex changes for kids.” On X, former Representative Matt Gaetz offered a tidy summary of his party’s agenda: “I hate the war too,” he told a concerned voter. “But the Democrats want to trans your kids.”
Partly, this is because Republicans don’t have much else to say. The administration’s immigration-enforcement strategy isn’t exactly popular. Voters have lost faith in the GOP on economic issues. Meanwhile, the president is obsessing over Corinthian columns. But Republicans also have some reason to believe that making trans happen is a useful strategy: It’s helped them before. Two years ago, a series of ads about Kamala Harris’s support for gender-affirming surgeries proved to be some of Trump’s most persuasive. (“Kamala is for they/them. President Trump is for you.”) In November, such ads could mean the difference between Republicans retaining and losing the Senate. “They believe that it energizes the base and divides ours,” Lanae Erickson, a senior vice president at the center-left think tank Third Way, told me. “And they’re right about that.”
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But it’s not clear that Democrats have figured out how to thwart the Republicans’ transgender gambit without betraying their own coalition.
The most jaw-dropping attack on Talarico probably comes from the American Principles Project, which has released an ad that is essentially a modern version of Lyndon B. Johnson’s “Daisy,” a sinister spot about the threat of nuclear war. The ad opens with a little girl standing in a field, counting flower petals. Everything is gray. Suddenly, the scene shifts, and the girl is in a hospital bed wearing an oxygen mask. An AI-generated Talarico looms over her in a pair of scrubs. “Irreversible puberty blockers. Cross-sex hormones. Sex-change surgeries,” the vaguely southern narrator declares. “This November, stop them before it’s too late.”
The ad exists because Republicans believe that its message will boost turnout among the base—just like it did in 2024—and help Ken Paxton beat Talarico in Texas. “We’ve done the polling to measure the voting impact that these issues have on voters, and they’re still at a good level,” Terry Schilling, the president of the American Principles Project, a social-conservative advocacy group, told me. Sure, the economy should be a stronger issue for the GOP, he said. But voters “despise the Democrats’ culture-war agenda. Period.” (Talarico, for his part, is running ads focused on funding schools and health care, and countering corruption in Washington.)
The president is aligned on the persuasive power of the anti-trans message. At the GOP convention in Dallas last month, Trump said that he was “petrified” that Democrats might change their position on transgender athletes in sports. “That will really hurt us,” he said. “That’s one of our great sound bites of all time.”
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Unfortunately for him, some Democrats are already doing just that. As a state legislator, Talarico was outspoken about transgender rights and inclusion; he voted against a bill banning certain gender-reassignment procedures for children and another banning transgender girls from K–12 girls’ sports. He once declared that parents who deny their child’s gender identity are “abusive.” Now, though, the seminarian turned Senate candidate sounds different. Asked last month whether girls should play in boys’ sports, he answered: “As a former public-school teacher, I care a lot about our student athletes, I care a lot about our students. And so I will oppose trans athletes playing in girls’ sports if it risks safety or fairness.” Talarico has dismissed some of his previous comments on the subject as “cringey.”
Two years ago, this might have gone differently; Talarico might not have responded to Republican attacks at all. That was once the customary advice from Democratic-consultant types, who believed that ignoring anti-trans attacks was safer than calling more attention to them. This is no longer best practice, Erickson, from Third Way, told me. The last election proved that “silence is deadly,” she said, noting that her group’s research shows that, unanswered, anti-trans attacks can seriously damage a Democratic candidate.
In the run-up to November, Erickson, who advises Democrats on how to talk about LGBTQ issues, has seen a sharp increase from candidates in requests for help. As GOP campaigns launch their last-minute trans-focused ads, Democrats want to know when to respond, what to say, and how to avoid offense. “They’re so scared they’re going to say the wrong thing,” she said.
Erickson, who declined to name the specific candidates she’s advising, offered some general advice. When answering questions about transgender players in sports, she argues, Democrats should embrace the sandwich method: Start with empathy, mention rules and fairness, and end with a little more empathy. Questions about health care for minors can be answered by reiterating that parents, not lawmakers, are the best decision makers for their own kids. One of Erickson’s favorite responses comes from Lindsay James, an Iowa Democratic House candidate, who in 2022 voted against a bill banning biological boys from playing on girls’ sports teams. “We need to protect kids, and we need common-sense rules to keep sports fair for boys and for girls,” James, who is running in a district that Trump won by 10 points in 2024, says in a new ad. “Parents know what’s best for our kids. Washington needs to stay out of it.”
The problem with Talarico’s and James’s answers is that they’re not very specific. Any journalist or curious voter would have plenty of follow-ups: When, for example, might an activity risk “safety or fairness”? What would fairness look like, and who would make the rules? Perhaps this is why other Democratic candidates are choosing to go off-script. Gina Hinojosa, who is running to replace Texas Governor Greg Abbott, has said that she won’t take up legislation related to the “culture wars” as governor; in a new ad, she declares, “My pronouns are mom, Texan, and soon-to-be governor.” The Ohio Democrat Sherrod Brown’s strategy is to point out the absurdity of focusing on trans issues at a time like this. “Here they go again, those same attacks against Sherrod Brown,” one voter says in a new Brown ad. “With everything going on, that’s what they’re talking about?” says another voter.
The desire to be straightforward has some Democrats sounding, well, a lot more like the Republicans in Congress. In Ohio, Amy Acton, who is running for governor, told the Toledo-based newspaper The Blade, “I do not support boys playing in girls’ sports.” Rob Sand, running for governor in Iowa, has repeatedly said that “girls’ sports are for girls, and boys’ sports are for boys.”
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Some Democrats have praised these candidates for their candor. Sand “has taken some of the cultural issues that dog Democrats in red states off the table,” Adam Jentleson, the founder of the center-left Searchlight Institute, told me in August. But their answers are not without political risk. Erickson, from Third Way, does not see Sand’s or Acton’s rhetoric on this issue as particularly helpful, mainly because calling transgender girls “boys” is misgendering them. “That is going to piss people off,” she said. She’s right.
After Acton’s comments to The Blade, LGBTQ advocates in Ohio set up a virtual meeting with her campaign, hoping to communicate their concerns. The Democrat’s comments about “boys playing in girls’ sports” were functionally “misgendering every single trans person in the state of Ohio,” and they amounted to “trans erasure,” Arienne Childrey, a state-House candidate and the vice chair of the Ohio Democratic Party’s Pride Caucus, told me.
But when the advocates logged on to the virtual call, they learned that Acton wouldn’t be joining and had instead sent campaign staff in her place. Things got worse. Childrey said that she was denied entry into the meeting, despite her role on the Pride Caucus, and when another activist pressed to get Childrey included, that person was ejected from the Zoom call. The discussion that followed was one-sided, another attendee told me. Acton’s campaign staff did not respond to any of their questions, this person said, and offered no reassurances for trans Ohioans on behalf of their boss. (The Acton campaign did not respond to requests for comment.)
A few weeks later, another Ohio Democrat, Representative Marcy Kaptur, whose race for reelection will be one of the most competitive in the country, confirmed Childrey’s fears by sounding, well, a little bit MAGA in a new campaign ad. “I voted with Republicans to keep transgender ideology out of our schools, because parents know what’s best for their kids, and boys should not play in girls’ sports,” Kaptur said.
Activists view the whole situation as an alarming shift among Democrats—one that portends worse to come. “Targeting trans people isn’t the winning strategy some people think it is,” Equality Ohio, an LGBTQ-advocacy group, told me in a statement. Childrey said that “the triangulation thought process is that we have to throw trans rights under the bus” to win elections: “We’re leaning in a direction that loses the heart and soul of what it means to be a Democrat.” In an online interview with a transgender political commentator last week, Childrey implied that she wouldn’t be voting for Acton in November, saying that activists need to show Democrats nationwide “that transphobia will not be a successful selling point.” The big risk, she explained, is that in 2028, “you’re going to have the choice between a transphobic Republican and a transphobic Democrat for president.”
Republicans are hopeful that a dogged focus on trans issues in the final days of this election season can depress turnout among Democratic voters like Childrey just as much as it energizes their own base. Democrats will have to hope that, this time, the GOP’s gambit will fail.
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