Why Trump’s Anti-Trans Ad Worked

Hillary Clinton spokesman Philippe Reines explains

A Trump campaign commercial reinforced the idea of Harris as hostage to the far left.

“Kamala is for they/them. President Trump is for you,” went the tagline of the Trump television commercial highlighting Kamala Harris’s response to an ACLU questionnaire in which she said she’d support taxpayer-funded sex-change operations for illegal aliens. The commercial must have aired in my house seven or eight times over the past few weeks, and we hardly ever watch television and we don’t live in a swing state. 

The New York Times has some good reporting on the ad buried in the midst of an overly long campaign postmortem: 

The Charlamagne ad ranked as one of the Trump team’s most effective 30-second spots, according to an analysis by Future Forward, Ms. Harris’s leading super PAC. It shifted the race 2.7 percentage points in Mr. Trump’s favor after viewers watched it.

The anti-trans ads cut to the core of the Trump argument: that Ms. Harris was “dangerously liberal” — the exact vulnerability her team was most worried about. The ads were effective with Black and Latino men, according to the Trump team, but also with moderate suburban white women who might be concerned about transgender athletes in girls’ sports.

Those were the same suburban women Ms. Harris was trying to mobilize with ads about abortion.

Democrats struggled to respond. At one point, former President Bill Clinton told an associate, “We have to answer it and say we won’t do it.” He even raised the issue in a conversation with the campaign and was told the Trump ads were not necessarily having an impact, according to two people familiar with his conversations. He never broached the topic publicly.

The Harris team debated internally how to respond. Ads the Harris team produced with a direct response to the “they/them” ads wound up faring poorly in internal tests. The ads never ran.

Maybe I wasn’t the target audience, but I found the ads targeting trans people, who have a hard time and deserve to be treated with the same human dignity as everyone else, cruel. I didn’t really get it until after the election, when I saw a former aide to Hillary Clinton, Philippe Reines, who played Trump in debate prep for Harris and for Hillary, on Kasie Hunt’s CNN show. Said Reines, as Hunt tweeted out the comments, “the woke stuff, the PC police stuff.”

“I don't like the fact that a small portion of our party is pretty much dictating where we are, that they are — pretty much we are being branded as the most extreme of us. It is not only politically problematic as we just saw, because none of this stuff helped the other day. Without a doubt, it’s a problem. But we need to take stock of why we are being held hostage to the far left. No one should be and wants to be kowtowing to the extremes of their own parties. ... The majority of Democrats don’t agree with the things that we are being tagged with. ... I think Democrats believe in common sense stuff more than you’d realize,” Reines said. “Most Democrats I know think there’s a huge problem at the border. Most Democrats I know think, frankly, that males at birth shouldn't play women sports and vice versa. Now, you can have a healthy conversation within a party. ... But at the end of the day, if you have some of these issues that are 80-20 across the country, you really got to figure out why they’re being so tagged with one."

What Reines is getting at, I think, is that the They/Them ad worked not because the American public is bigoted against trans people, but because it’s a stand-in for the broader “held hostage to the far left,” “woke,” issue. Harris, the daughter of academics from Berkeley, California, was vulnerable to that line of attack. And by answering the ACLU questionnaire the way she did, she left herself open to the attack and showed herself wanting to woo the activist left wing of her party rather than stand up against it. 

Iran Tried to Kill Trump: We’ve reported here in recent weeks about Iran’s plan to kill President Trump and some of his former aides. (“If Trump is such a relative patsy for the Iranians, why would the Iranians be trying to assassinate him?” I wrote back on October 13.) The Justice Department today issued a press release disclosing additional public details about those Iranian activities.