Anyone who watches football has probably seen one of the most arresting ads of the campaign season in recent weeks, showing images of Vice President Kamala Harris superimposed with transgender members of the Biden administration and a scene lifted from the television show “Orange Is the New Black” of inmates in prison jumpsuits.
“It’s hard to believe, but it’s true,” the narrator says. “Even the liberal media was shocked. Kamala supports taxpayer funded sex changes for prisoners and illegal aliens.”
“Kamala is for they/them,” the advertisement concludes. “President Trump is for you.”
Former President Trump’s campaign has called the economy the central issue of the election and polls show most voters agree. But a message receiving prominent play in the campaign’s final weeks is aimed squarely at reigniting the culture wars, highlighting an issue that has little direct effect on most Americans’ lives.
A Trump campaign official said the ads are playing in battleground states and across the nation during college and pro football games, making them among the most circulated ads this campaign cycle.
“There is nothing subtle about this ad,” said Tali Mendelberg, author of “The Race Card: Campaign Strategy, Implicit Messages, and the Norm of Equality.”
Mendelberg, a Princeton political scientist, compares the ad’s use of “stigmatizing images to evoke prejudices about marginalized populations” to the infamous Willie Horton ads of 1988, which former President George H.W. Bush used to defeat Massachusetts Gov. Michael Dukakis. Those ads, later disavowed by Bush’s campaign strategist, included images of a Black murderer on a prison furlough program in Massachusetts who raped a white woman.
“Whatever one thinks about public funding of transgender operations for imprisoned people, or about granting weekend furloughs from prison, these ads could further stigmatize people who are often subjected to severe discrimination,” Mendelberg said.
The Trump campaign appears to be banking on two things with the ads: reinforcing its advantage with young male voters and painting Harris as far left with more persuadable voters.
A Trump campaign official said Harris wants to hide the truth about her “radical policies” and pointed to a recent comment from its co-campaign manager Chris LaCivita to NBC News.
“It’s the last thing on Earth they want to talk about,” LaCivita said. “So we’ll talk about it for them.”
Harris, in a 2019 ACLU questionnaire she filled out while running in the Democratic presidential primary, said she would use her executive authority to ensure transgender people in prison or immigration detention have access to gender care “including all necessary surgical care.”
Several courts have determined that prisoners have that right if they can prove the care is medically necessary. Public polling shows support for some expanded rights for transgender people in areas such as employment discrimination but less tolerance for transgender prisoner rights, including the right to be housed with a gender identity that differs from the sex assigned at birth.
“There’s tremendous backlash against that nonsense among ordinary Americans,” said Charlie Gerow, a Republican consultant based in Pennsylvania, the largest battleground state. “This is an issue that shows how far out of touch Kamala Harris is.”
The Harris campaign pointed to a recent statement from Michael Tyler, its communications director, who told Fox News “that questionnaire is not what she is proposing or running on.”
Trump has pushed the Republican Party further into exploiting the country’s racial, gender and sexual divisions. His 2016 campaign was fueled in part by his prior role in promoting an unfounded conspiracy theory that Barack Obama, the first Black president, was not born in the U.S.
He has said immigrants are “poisoning the blood” of the country and said Jews would bear blame if he loses the election. On Thursday, he said “our whole country will end up being like Detroit,” a majority Black city, if Harris, who would be the first Black female president, is elected.
“What they’re banking on is that lack of familiarity to create fear,” said Kelley Robinson, president of the Human Rights Campaign, an LGBTQ+ advocacy group backing Harris. “And that is an old strategy of divisiveness that they’ve used on communities for centuries.”
Robinson is confident it will not work. But she does worry about the effect on transgender youth, who according to one recent study were more likely to attempt suicide if they lived in states that passed anti-trans laws.
“That part is really heartbreaking,” she said, calling on politicians to consider the rise in hate crimes.
Robinson cited the failure of many candidates running on anti-trans rhetoric in the 2022 midterm elections to argue that the advertisements will not be effective.
But Trump ran a similar campaign in the 2016 election, announcing his candidacy by labeling immigrants rapists and murderers, and won. And Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis won a landslide reelection in 2022 with the promise to beat back the “woke agenda.”
“It is effective with about 46% of the electorate,” said Cornell Belcher, Obama’s pollster and the author of “A Black Man in the White House: Barack Obama and the Triggering of America’s Racial-Aversion Crisis.”
Belcher argues that the voters Trump most needs, a “mom sitting at her kitchen table in the suburbs of Philadelphia looking at her bills” and wondering whether her daughter will grow up with fewer rights, will not be swayed.
“Does that old dog still hunt? Yes it still does hunt, but its opportunity is less,” he argued.