Anti-LGBTQ Rhetoric Helps Trump Win Decisive Victory over Harris

A majority of U.S. voters set aside all evidence of Republican nominee Donald Trump’s mental decline, adoration of dictators, criminal convictions, and hostility to the U.S. Constitution and gave him a decisive victory November 5 over Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris.

Mother Jones magazine called the 2024 presidential election the “most anti-LGBTQ election in decades.” And, on Wednesday morning, many post-election political analysts were crediting much of Trump’s victory to the campaign’s $21 million investment in an anti-transgender ad. The ad ran more than 30,000 times—especially during televised football games—and apparently helped win over young men of all races. In a campaign heavily divided by gender—including the possibility that the U.S. would elect its first woman president—the ad apparently helped secure the popular vote and the necessary electoral votes in closely contested swing states.

And much of the post-game commentary criticized the Harris campaign’s failure to produce any response to the ad. Fox News reporter Bret Baier tried to get some traction for the anti-LGBTQ tactic during his interview with Harris October 16. “Are you still in support of using taxpayer dollars to help prison inmates or detained illegal aliens to transition to another gender?” asked Baier. “I will follow the law, and it’s a law that Donald Trump actually followed,” noted Harris.

The ads and various speeches by Trump at rallies derided the “transgender insanity” in schools. Trump repeatedly characterized Harris’ position as supporting the use of taxpayer funding for “sex-change operations” and transgender people in girls and women’s sports.

The ad did not, of course, explain that a 1976 U.S. Supreme Court ruling held that the Eighth Amendment requires federal prisons to make “medically necessary” treatment available to prisoners. The American Medical Association and others have deemed “mental health care, hormone therapy, and gender-affirming surgical procedures [as] medically necessary….” 

The Trump ads used a video clip showing a transgender basketball player towering over her young female teammates. (There is no way of telling whether the images were authentic or fabricated by artificial intelligence.) Another showed Harris responding in 2019 to a question from a transgender interviewer, asking her position on the availability of treatment for gender dysphoria for prisoners. In response, Harris chose her words carefully, noting that the law requires every transgender person in prison “have access” to medically necessary treatment.

But however much the anti-trans ads may have garnered Trump a margin of victory, at deadline, data available from major media outlets showed Trump with 71 million votes to Harris’ 66 million. News media tallies also indicated Trump won at least four and possibly all seven swing states, finishing the race with 277 electoral votes to Harris’ 224. (It takes 270 to win.)

The LGBTQ community invested heavily in the Harris bid to succeed Democratic President Joe Biden and become the first woman and first woman of color to win the presidency. LGBTQ media outlets, including those in the three swing states Harris had to win (Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania), endorsed her. LGBTQ groups did, too, including the Human Rights Campaign, the National LGBTQ Task Force Action Fund, the National Center for Transgender Equality Action Fund, and the Equality Political Action Committee.

Log Cabin Republicans backed Trump and used the transgender issue itself. “Harris and [Democratic Vice-Presidential nominee Tim Walz] are crusaders for a small but powerful cabal of the LGBT Left which wants to erase the concept of biological sex from society, expose young children to overtly sexualized and ideological content, and strip parents of their rights to make critical decisions about their children,” wrote national Log Cabin President Charles Moran, in an op-ed September 13 in Newsweek magazine.

An unusual campaign, start to finish

The 81-year-old President Biden withdrew his bid for re-election in July, after showing signs of cognitive difficulty and confusion during a debate with Trump. Biden immediately threw his support behind his vice president, Harris, creating a groundswell of support for the 60-year-old former San Francisco prosecutor and California attorney general. Biden’s support, coupled with the party’s obvious relief that it was overcoming concerns about its nominee’s ability to serve, seemed to cure Democrats’ panic. But race and gender started to play a major part in voters’ thinking.

Voters in seven highly contested swing states gave Trump control of the White House and gave Republicans a decisive majority in the U.S. Senate. At deadline, partisan control of the U.S. House had not yet been determined, but the New York Times reported that Republicans were leading with 197 seats to Democrats’ 177. At deadline, there were still 64 seats yet to be decided, many of them in California. That leaves open the hope that Democrats might be able to take majority control of the U.S. House. If they don’t, Trump will have a rubber stamp Congress with Republican majorities in both chambers.

Joe Scarborough, host of the popular MSNBC commentary show Morning Joe, said Wednesday morning he believes the anti-transgender ads that popped up during football games in the swing states “had a bigger impact that any ad that ran and that’s why they ran it 30,000 times.”

Washington Post commentator Matt Bai said, “Democrats dug themselves into a hole on cultural issues and identity politics.”

One of the ads’ closing lines was “She’s for they/them, he’s for you,” noted Bai, who agreed that “Trump’s vicious transgender ad in the closing weeks was probably the most effective of the cycle.

“I think that probably landed with a lot of traditionally Democratic voters who feel like the party is consumed with cultural issues while the economic issues don’t really change,” wrote Bai.

On a podcast with conservative Joe Rogan, Republican vice presidential candidate J. D. Vance said, “Frankly, I wouldn’t be surprised if me and Trump won just the normal gay guy vote because they just want to be left the hell alone.” (Reporter’s note: Readers should consider listening to Vance’s intonations to judge for themselves what he means to say.)

Openly gay CNN news anchor Anderson Cooper pondered Vance’s comment on his show. “I’m curious where the line is between a ‘normal gay person’ and a ‘not-normal gay person’ is,” said Cooper. “I’m assuming that wearing as much make-up as Donald Trump wears—that would be considered not normal—fine for Donald Trump but on a gay guy that wouldn’t be considered normal. 

Los Angeles Times reporter Noah Bierman told ABC that, while transgender people are not a top issue for Republicans in the same way migrants are, the ads are “really intended to bring the culture wars back in.

“The Trump campaign is heavily focused on young men, and they feel like this is an issue that resonates with them,” said Bierman. He said they are also intended to paint Harris as an out-of-touch liberal.

A national poll of 806 registered voters, conducted online and by phone in mid-October, found that eight percent (64 voters) identified themselves as LGBTQ. While voters overall split 50 percent for Harris, 47 percent for Trump, and three percent others, voters who identified themselves as LGBTQ preferred Harris 78 percent to Trump’s 20 percent and other’s two percent. (The poll also provided some interesting data on how “masculine” and how “feminine” the voters perceive each candidate to be and how that affected their votes.)

Coincidentally, three states voted on same-sex marriage laws Tuesday: California, Colorado, and Hawaii. Although the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 2015 that states had to allow same-sex couples to obtain marriage licenses the same as heterosexual couples, very few states that had banned such marriages took them out of their state constitutions.

In California, voters approved Proposition 3 to amend the state constitution to repeal Proposition 8, which in 2008 prohibited same-sex marriage. Passed with 61 percent of the vote, Proposition 3 would also amend the state constitution to establish a right of marriage for same-sex couples.

Colorado passed a similar measure, Amendment J with 64 percent and in Hawaii, Question 1 passed with 61 percent.

© 2024 Keen News Service. All rights reserved.