The world’s richest man is spending at least $100 million on the midterm elections to support the Republican Party and his far-right agenda. But it looks like Elon Musk’s focus won’t be the economy, or the war in Iran or artificial intelligence. It won’t be his repellent ideas about race and his advocacy for “white solidarity.” Instead, Musk has come out of the gate with a barrage of ads targeting Democrats for not being sufficiently supportive of discrimination against transgender Americans.
It’s ugly and hateful, but Musk’s efforts, and those of other Republicans who are sending the same message, will probably fail.
If the anti-trans ads were brilliantly effective, they should have made a difference in the places where they were run most frequently. But they didn’t.
Two months ago, one Republican operative described the party’s strategy this way: “It’s going to be a hate election.” In fact, that’s a fair description of every Republican campaign going back decades. As Richard Nixon aide Kevin Phillips, the architect of the “Southern Strategy,” said in 1968, “The whole secret of politics is knowing who hates who.” Republicans always have a group they want people to hate. Sometimes it’s immigrants, sometimes it’s Muslims, sometimes it’s uppity women, but there’s always a target.
This year, like the last two years, the GOP has decided the hatred should be directed at trans people, a small and vulnerable group of Americans who already face extraordinary discrimination.
Musk’s transphobia carries a personal motivation: One of his children, a trans woman, has publicly rejected him, and he says she was “killed by the woke mind virus.” And he likely believes that using the anti-trans playbook Donald Trump ran against Kamala Harris in 2024 is the path to success. It’s a common myth, one that never had any empirical support.
That year Republicans spent $215 million on advertising attacking trans people. After Trump won by 1.5% of the popular vote, the inference that the anti-trans ads made the difference became conventional wisdom. Even now, both inside and outside the GOP, many treat the argument as so self-evidently true it requires no investigation (“Republicans remember how lethal the Trump campaign’s ‘Kamala is for they/them’ ads were to Kamala Harris’ campaign in 2024,” Axios recently wrote).
But the assertion that those ads were terribly effective, let alone “lethal” to Harris, has no evidence to support it. No quantitative studies, no analysis of voting patterns showing that places where the ads aired went stronger for Trump, nothing.
When Democrats say, “I support trans rights but I also have concerns” — as too many of them do — they earn no credit.
There has been little research at all investigating this question. But a randomized trial at the end of the campaign found that while showing voters Trump’s ad produced a small negative effect on sympathy for trans people, “the Trump ad yielded no statistically significant shift in voter choice, mobilization or likelihood to vote.”
That’s not definitive, given that testing ads in a controlled trial doesn’t mirror the way people receive them in the real world. But in that real world, Harris performed better in places where the campaign was most intense on the ground and in the air. If the anti-trans ads were brilliantly effective, they should have made a difference in the places where they were run most frequently. But they didn’t.
In 2025, Republicans tried the anti-trans attacks again, including in the gubernatorial contests in Virginia and New Jersey. Democrats won both contests easily and anti-trans candidates lost local races across the country.
Nevertheless, Musk and his GOP allies are reopening this spigot of hate.
How should Democrats respond? Frightened hedging won’t work. When Democrats say, “I support trans rights but I also have concerns” — as too many of them do — they earn no credit. It only reinforcing the idea that they’re weak and unprincipled., which is the single biggest image problem the Democratic Party faces.
Bans on trans athletes would have to be enforced somehow, such as through invasive (and expensive) DNA testing or gential inspections.
Another answer is to just ignore it, and turn the conversation back what voters actually care about. Poll after poll shows economic concerns swamping every other issue in the campaign.
Or Democrats could choose an approach they seldom take on this issue: Attack. Turn the issue back on their GOP opponents. Let’s consider the issue of trans athletes in sports. A ballot initiative pushed by Republicans in Washington state, for example, requires doctors to verify the sex assigned at birth of every girl who wants play sports. Other GOP-backed bans lack provisions for verifying school athletes’ sex, admitting by omission that any such mechanisms would be unpopular. Before passing a ban in 2021, for example, Florida Republicans removed at the last moment language that would have required transgender athletes in high schools undergo a physical exam and testosterone and genetic testing.
But these bans would have to be enforced somehow, such as through invasive (and expensive) DNA testing or genital inspections. If Democrats were as ruthless as Republicans, they’d be saying things like “I’m worried about how to make life more affordable, but my opponent wants to require genital inspections for little girls. We need to leave kids alone, and tell my opponent to stay out of our kids’ locker rooms.”
Few if any Democrats will do that, of course. But all of them do need to be ready for the nine-figure tsunami of hate Elon Musk is about to unleash on them. They can start by remembering that this campaign from a deeply unpopular tech oligarch is unlikely to succeed. Perhaps knowing that, they’ll realize that standing up against hate is always the right thing to do.
The post Elon Musk is reusing Trump’s anti-trans strategy. It’s unlikely to work. appeared first on MS NOW.
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