In the weeks before Election Day, aides to Kamala Harris could see in campaign polling that Donald J. Trump’s attacks on Ms. Harris’s support for transgender rights were driving away swing voters.
Struggling to put together a rebuttal, they produced a series of ads arguing that Mr. Trump was trying to distract from more important issues. Some of the spots noted that the policy Mr. Trump was seizing on, taxpayer-funded gender-transition surgery for inmates, was in place when he was president.
But none of the messages significantly swayed voters when the ads were tested with focus groups, according to four former Harris campaign aides who spoke on the condition of anonymity.
After a sharp, internal debate, the campaign shelved the ads. Instead, it settled on an anodyne television spot that showed the vice president condemning “negative ads” without mentioning Mr. Trump’s transgender attacks.
Since Ms. Harris’s defeat, her campaign’s decision has landed in the center of a contentious debate over how large a role transgender issues played in her party’s losses around the country. Several prominent Democrats said Ms. Harris’s relative silence was a damaging concession to Mr. Trump — and evidence that the campaign was so out of step with Americans’ views that it did not appreciate the potency of the ads.
“Malpractice was committed by that campaign,” said Ed Rendell, a Democratic former governor of Pennsylvania and former chairman of the Democratic National Committee. Mr. Rendell said he was so alarmed by the Trump attacks that he called top Harris campaign advisers, pleading for them to respond directly.
“They saw the ad, they knew it was being bought in heavy quantities,” he said. “Where were they? What were they thinking?”
That view has faced vocal pushback from some Democrats, particularly on the left, who warn against pinning Ms. Harris’s loss on her position on transgender rights. In a year when voters were so concerned about the economy and unhappy with President Biden, they argue, there is little hard evidence that transgender issues had a significant impact on the results.
“I never heard it anywhere on the campaign trail,” said Representative Mark Pocan of Wisconsin, a Democrat. Mr. Pocan said that scapegoating a small and vulnerable group was “the ultimate misdirection” — and that the party instead needed to address its failure to deliver on the economic concerns of working-class voters.
But for Democrats now turning to rebuild after a demoralizing and decisive loss, the question of how the party deals with transgender rights has emerged as a challenge for the years ahead. Democrats are divided as they watch what many see as a matter of basic human rights become part of the Republican arsenal.
What is taking place is both an autopsy of the Harris campaign strategy and a debate over key questions about the future. Does the party need to adjust its messaging before the 2026 midterm elections and the 2028 presidential race? Should transgender people’s access to health care or sports teams be embraced as the kind of civil rights cause Democrats have championed for generations? Should the party allow for more dissent and open discussion, as Representative Seth Moulton, a Massachusetts Democrat, argued after the election?
Republicans clearly see a political opportunity. The Trump campaign spent more than $37 million on television ads that invoked transgender issues, nearly 20 percent of its overall ad budget, according to data provided by AdImpact, an organization that tracks political ad placement and spending.
Republicans also deployed advertisements on transgender issues in Senate races. In Ohio, Republicans attacked Senator Sherrod Brown by saying he supported “allowing trans biological men in girls’ locker rooms.” Mr. Brown, unlike Ms. Harris, responded with his own ad, calling that claim “a complete lie.” (He lost his seat.)
Ms. Harris could not dismiss the Trump attacks so easily. Mr. Trump’s most prominent ad used a 5-year-old video clip of Ms. Harris saying that “every transgender inmate in the prison system would have access” to taxpayer-funded gender transitions. “Kamala is for they/them. President Trump is for you,” an announcer said.
In an interview, Senator John Fetterman, a Pennsylvania Democrat, denounced political attacks on transgender people. But the Trump campaign ad, he acknowledged, amounted to a “brilliant type of political messaging” that cast Republicans as focused on “you” and the Democrats as overly attuned to issues that did not affect the lives of many Americans.
“How can you sum up ‘woke’ in one commercial?” Mr. Fetterman said. “Try and top that.”
Mr. Trump’s attacks on transgender rights came from a familiar playbook. For nearly 50 years, Republicans have seized on divisive social issues that touch a nerve with the public but are often underestimated by Democrats. They typically focus on an issue that affects a small minority of Americans — but can be used to cast a candidate as out of touch.
Mr. Trump’s message tapped into some Americans’ unease about changing gender norms, particularly as the issues were framed by the Republican presidential candidate. At his rallies, he mocked transgender female athletes, and, later in the campaign, claimed — falsely — that schools had conducted transition surgery on students without informing their parents.
It is difficult to know how effective these attacks were. The issue was far from the top concern mentioned by voters in polls before Election Day: It trailed well behind the economy and immigration. In a Gallup poll, voters ranked transgender rights as the least important of 22 issues in the 2024 election. Only about 1 percent of Americans identify as transgender, according to Gallup.
But pollsters said it might have played a less obvious and still significant role: For one thing, Mr. Trump used it to reach his core base of voters, who turned out for him in strong numbers on Election Day.
“That’s what Republicans do very, very well,” said Cornell Belcher, a Democratic pollster. “They keep their vote energized and mobilized.”
The attacks might also have had an impact on swing voters in indirect and subtle ways. Part of the Trump campaign’s aim was to portray Ms. Harris, whose election would have broken gender and racial barriers to the White House, as out of the mainstream, analysts from both parties said.
“That was the headline: That she is ‘other,’” Mr. Belcher said. “That entire ad says, ‘She is not one of us. She doesn’t share our values. She’s scary.’ It’s not just transgender people: It’s all Americans who are not quote-unquote, traditional Americans.”
Americans have nuanced and sometimes contradictory views in the debates over transgender rights. And the positions of many Democrats on critical issues — such as support for minors using puberty-blocking medications and surgery to transition — are not in line with many Americans.
Roughly 55 percent of voters said support for transgender rights in government and society has gone too far, according to AP VoteCast. More than 60 percent of adults say transgender women and girls should not be allowed to compete in sports with other women and girls, a Washington Post-KFF poll found. And strong majorities oppose minors’ using medications or hormone treatments, according to the Post-KFF poll.
At the same time, more than 60 percent of Americans support protecting transgender people from discrimination, according to the Pew Research Center. Most also oppose the government banning gender-affirming care for minors, including medication and surgery, Gallup found.
For Democrats, a central question is how much these issues will be used by Republicans in future presidential campaigns — as well as whether they will prove to be effective as the issue becomes more familiar to Americans.
Public attitudes on social debates have historically evolved with time. In 2004, the campaign of George W. Bush tapped into opposition to same-sex marriage as a way to rally conservative voters and turn independent voters against Democrats. Two decades later, gay marriage is almost a mainstream position.
Representative Sara Jacobs, a California Democrat, said that rather than ignoring the issue, she believes Democrats must make a proactive case to dispel the fears of voters, as they did in the fights against same-sex marriage bans.
And for all the attention on Mr. Trump’s use of the issue, voters elected the first transgender member of Congress this year: Sarah McBride, a Democrat from Delaware. (Even before Ms. McBride was sworn in, Representative Nancy Mace, a South Carolina Republican, said she would introduce a measure to bar transgender women from using women’s rooms and changing rooms in the Capitol complex.)
Democrats positioning themselves for the 2028 presidential race are looking for lessons from the Harris campaign.
The Trump ads on transgender surgeries for inmates were among the most damaging attacks on the vice president — although not as potent as the messages about the economy, crime and immigration — said the campaign officials, who asked for anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss internal deliberations. The campaign’s research concluded that the ads made voters think that Ms. Harris was focusing on things they did not care about, instead of the economy, their top priority.
After testing several response ads, the campaign ultimately resorted to smaller-scale direct rebuttals, including digital ads that focused on the Trump administration policy that also paid for transition surgeries. And it ran ads on search engines that would appear if people searched for more information about Mr. Trump’s attacks.
The aides did not say whether Mr. Harris weighed in on the discussion.
But largely the campaign decided the best response was changing the subject. Meg Schwenzfeier, the chief analytics officer for the Harris campaign, said the vice president’s team determined its economic message was the most effective answer.
“In all of our quantitative and qualitative research on this ad, our best-testing responses pivoted to the economy,” Ms. Schwenzfeier said. “These responses not only neutralized the attack but actually moved people towards us — because they showed voters that the vice president did care about you.”
Exit polls show the vice president did not win the economic argument. More than half of voters said they trusted Mr. Trump, rather that Ms. Harris, to handle the economy.
In this charged post-election environment, the Trump attacks are outliving the campaign. Activists and others who work with transgender people, particularly transgender youths, say the political debate has resulted in a spike in reports of cyberbullying, online harassment and family tensions.
“I can talk about the harm caused as evidenced by a surge of calls to our crisis line,” said Jaymes Black, the chief executive of the Trevor Project, which focuses on suicide prevention among L.G.B.T.Q. youths. “This peddling of the negative stereotypes exacerbates the mental crisis of our young people.”
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