Spotlighting Scapegoats

Who pays the price for progressive mistakes?

Trump’s job is to tie Kamala to the unpopular positions she took in the 2020 primary.

Kamala’s job is to execute the full pivot from “too progressive for Democratic primary voters” to winning the center-right voters needed to get over the top in the GOP-skewed electoral college.

Into this context flows $120,000,000 of anti-trans ads.

Will they work?

---

Bad Track Record

In the midterms, GOP attacks on transgender kids failed to move the needle. As research from Third Way showed, voters had much different priorities. Meanwhile, the GOP candidates who relied heavily on anti-trans ads had a shared result: they lost.

Candidates like Michigan gubernatorial candidate Tudor Dixon, who ran this ad with a scary voiceover focused on kids and drag queens while losing a swing state by eleven points:

That trend continued last year. Recall our conversation with Gov. Andy Beshear’s strategist David Eichebaum after Kentucky’s 2023 gubernatorial race:

We were hammered for months over charges that Andy Beshear favors sex change operations for minors. This is part of a broader attack against Democrats on transgender rights that started with Glenn Youngkin, back in 2021. We countered those attacks exactly one time. Andy said to the camera that all children are children of God.

Why did that work?

The ad worked because it’s what he believes. And it worked because we had set that up already with other ads earlier on, where we had established his faith.

Democrats won that race in a state Trump carried by 36 points. These attacks don’t seem like the most effective use of paid media, although Republicans are still running them in Senate races this year.

Pivot Problems

A deep-dive on these ads in the presidential came out in The Bulwark this week.

Marc A. Caputo

talked to the Trump campaign for the story, titled “Trump Goes All In on Anti-Trans: It’s not clear if the ads will help Trump, hurt Harris - or just scapegoat trans people.”

According to the Trump campaign, the ads don’t really seem to be about trans issues at the core. The attacks are about interrupting Kamala’s pivot from the far left stances she took five years ago in the presidential primary. They intentionally hit a wide range of salient issues. Just look at the screenshots: visuals of prisoners, quotes from PBS and The New York Times, and using Kamala’s own words pandering to a progressive interest group.

Here’s Caputo:

Trump has so far run three ads that each feature video of Harris in 2019 boasting about her advocacy as California attorney general for the surgeries for the incarcerated. The ads, which have been condemned by trans advocates as transphobic and cruel, are designed to reinforce the Trump campaign’s message that Harris is “dangerously liberal.”

Caputo talked to a Trump campaign pollster, who was explicit that these anti-trans ads aren’t actually about trans policy at all:

Trump pollster John McLaughlin said that viewing the campaign’s emphasis on trans issues as a tradeoff with its focus on the economy represents a shallow understanding of “asymmetrical political warfare.” Presidential races aren’t as much battles over policy plans, he said, as they are character contests.

“In that character contrast, these cultural issues become symbols of those characters,” McLaughlin said. “They don’t have to be the top issue, but they have to make a values-connection with a majority of voters, and this is symbolic of why her character doesn’t connect with a majority of voters.”

These may technically qualify as anti-trans ads, but the character allegation here is far broader. It is about the national discomfort with how far-left the Democratic Party went on a wide range of issues. And swing voter fears that Kamala would go along with all of it.

One ad emphasizes “Kamala supports taxpayer funded sex changes for prisoners and illegal aliens”. In eleven words, this hits three major issues - taxes, crime, and immigration - with gender just being the hook.

Beyond gender, it is Kamala’s own words on video that seem like they could be swapped out for decriminalizing the border or banning fracking: “The power that I had. I used it in a way that was about pushing for the movement frankly and the agenda.“

Will it work? Back to the Third Way research:

Culture war attacks have been the crux of the Republican Party’s strategy for the past few elections. And while some hit their mark this time around—particularly on crime and immigration in races where Democrats failed to rebut them early and forcefully—others fell flat. GOP fearmongering on the “transgender agenda” hit an all-time high this year, with ads targeting transgender children running in at least 25 states totaling at least $50 million. Yet the candidates who made these attacks the centerpiece of their argument to voters failed at the ballot box.

If the ads work, it is more likely to be for the factors listed here - crime, immigration, and a failure to rebut them early - and on the missteps of progressive nonprofits.

Maura’s Model

The first edition of Centrist School, our series on the rise and fall of the far-left, led with a decision by Maura Healey while she was running to become governor of Massachusetts. She kept her well-earned progressive credibility on the campaign trail while rejecting the leftist blob forcing all Democratic candidates to get on-the-record in favor of deeply unpopular issues:

In 2018, every mainstream Democrat was looking over their shoulders in fear of the Far Left, egged on by the media and Twitterati.

Five years later, we are back to reality. 

Nowhere is that more evident than in the most liberal state in the country. One year ago this week, a progressive firebrand turned pragmatic consensus builder walked unopposed into the Massachusetts Democratic nomination for governor – after refusing¹ to even fill out the policy questionnaires of those same Far Left groups who had scared incumbents four years prior. The bubble had burst.

In these vile ads, we see what Healey was avoiding - the pain that accrues to the vulnerable when progressive purity tests go too far.

We are back to reality, and it does not look good for the far-left purity test strategy.

Read Chait

In New York magazine, Jonathan Chait outlines this phenomenon that stretches across nearly every progressive issue.

The article, How Progressive Overreach Gave Trump His Favorite Attack Ad, has the perfect subtitle: Harris’s 2019 campaign continues haunting her from the grave. Here’s one excerpt:

The groups in the coalition increasingly tend to define agreement with their cause in maximal terms … Climate activists increasingly use the term “climate denier,” once reserved for those who refuse to accept the theory of anthropogenic global warming, for any skeptic of any element of their preferred remedies. The rampant absolutism makes it difficult to acknowledge even the possibility that there are political risks attached to going too far in agreement with the movement.

Groups dedicated to pushing Democrats to adopt the most expansive pro-trans-rights position don’t admit getting candidates on the record endorsing free transition surgeries for prisoners and detained migrants might have been a mistake.

Avoiding such mistakes in the future will require organizing among moderate Democrats to push back against this litmus test shrinkage:

The incentive for every group to push its own demands to the maximum is almost self-evident. (Imagine trying to raise money and organize for a cause when you concede that cause is the one politicians should put on the slow burner.)

The reason Democrats continue to field these data-impervious demands is that the progressive movement (much like the conservative movement, after which it was modeled) has a culture of affirming rather than questioning the predispositions of its core policy demanders.

This culture involves endlessly recycled evasions, such as — to pick one favorite — the claim that Republicans are going to accuse Democrats of advocating radical positions anyway, so they might as well endorse them. “Shaking ‘you’re for open borders & “transing” school kids’ doesn’t actually happen by ignoring the claims nor offering light support for draconian measures. Accusations will still come & stick,” argues progressive message guru Anat Shenker-Osorio, as if an ad fabricating an extreme position held by a Democratic candidate is no less effective than one using the Democrat’s own words.

There is, of course, a good reason why Trump’s campaign is pouring millions into ads tying Harris to a position she actually advocated rather than making other, even more unpopular positions, and also why those ads cite mainstream news sources vouching for the truth of the claim.

You should read the whole thing, as well as a new Third Way report on The Decline of Far-Left Electoral Organizations.

It helps explain why Maura Healey, the nation’s first lesbian governor, rejected progressive purity tests to become very popular - more popular than her home state Senator Elizabeth Warren. And why the closing ads against Kamala Harris feature her own words responding to the same progressive nonprofit dynamic that Healey eschewed. These groups have horizontally integrated, seeking maximal purity tests across every issue. Kamala’s words in the ad - “The power that I had. I used it in a way that was about pushing for the movement frankly and the agenda.“ - could easily be about the border or energy policy. That’s what voters are hearing. And they aren’t just hearing it because that’s what they hear on Fox News. That’s what progressive nonprofits trained voters to hear. And they built a symbiotic relationship with right-wing media to put pragmatic Democrats in a pincer.

Consider how the maximalist across-the-board approach of progressive nonprofits has shrunk the coalition to the point where their missions may all be worse off. Think about what can arise to counter these problems post-election. And ask yourself, who pays the price for the mistakes these groups won’t admit?