Donald Trump and the GOP are going all-in against trans athletes. But do voters care?

Republican candidates, led by Donald Trump, are betting that opposing transgender rights, with a focus on banning trans women in sports, will have a political payoff despite the same playbook flopping two years ago in the midterms.

Trump has repeatedly brought up two cases of what he says are men playing women’s sports, despite no confirmation that the athletes in question are trans (one of them is an Olympic boxer from Algeria who is a woman despite what has been alleged). Facts don’t matter though as the GOP seeks to frame trans women’s sports participation as a threat in the hopes of garnering votes.

The fact that this issue has salience with the Republican base came Wednesday at a town hall in Georgia on Fox News, focusing on women’s issues. A woman in the audience told Trump she was scared about her six granddaughters playing sports on the field and in the locker room and asked him “How do you plan on addressing the issue of women’s sports?”

“We’re not going to let it happen,” Trump said. “They had a volleyball match, did you see that, where a person who transitioned, OK, and you have to be very careful because this could terminate your political career if you say it slightly off, transitioned from man to female and it was on a volleyball, and I saw the slam, it was a slam, I never saw a ball hit so hard, hit the girl on the head, but other people, even in volleyball they’ve been permanently, they’ve really been hurt badly, women, playing men.

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“But you don’t have to do the volleyball, we stop it, we stop it, we absolutely stop it, you can’t have it. It’s a man playing in a game, I mean physically from a muscular, even if it was a little bit less, maybe they do all sorts of tests and drugs and everything else. Look at what happened in swimming, look at the records that are being broken.”

Moderator: “So how do you stop it? To the sports leagues, do you go to the Olympics?”

Trump: “You just ban it. The president bans it, you just don’t let it happen.”

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Trump was referencing the San Jose State women’s volleyball team and player Blaire Fleming. Fleming has competed in the female category for many years and has not come out publicly as trans or otherwise, but the anti-trans forces have made her a cause celebre, with some teams refusing to play San Jose State. The “slam” Trump is referencing is a spike from Fleming that hit an opponent in the head and knocked her down, but she was not injured. Also, no president has the authority to ban people from playing sports.

That otherwise-obscure San Jose State women’s volleyball is a hot topic for a presidential candidate shows how hard Republicans are leaning into anti-trans messaging. The proof lies in the amount of money being spent on such ads (the New York Times says a total of $65 million), some that I have seen several times while watching football.

The Trump campaign has spent more than $19 million on two television ads that have aired nearly 55,000 times since Oct. 1, according to data from AdImpact. Make America Great Again Inc., the leading super political action committee supporting Trump, has spent more than $1.1 million during the same time period on a similar ad that has aired more than 6,000 times. 

The campaign’s ads are playing in all battleground states and airing during NFL and college football games, a Trump campaign official said.  …

Trump is not the only candidate using the issue to criticize his Democratic rival. The debate over transgender girls in sports and locker rooms is featured in Republican ads in key Senate races. CBS

The big question is whether voters care. While polls show opposition to trans women playing in women’s sports, the issue is at the bottom of issues voters say motivates them. A Gallup poll found that transgender rights rank last in concerns affecting voters, even Republican voters.

Anti-trans issues flopped in 2022

We have evidence that the trans issue is not a winner for the GOP, and that’s the 2022 midterm elections where the issue was prominent in many races and came a cropper. As Dave Weigel in Semafor writes:

“Republicans are running more ads than ever about transgender rights — an issue that hasn’t previously worked for GOP candidates in swing states. In Michigan and Ohio [in 2022], attempts to link abortion rights amendments to ‘sex changes for minors’ fell flat. In deep red Kentucky, Gov. Andy Beshear won two tight campaigns despite ads that linked him to ‘the transgender industry,’ and his veto of LGBTQ-related legislation passed by Republicans.”

Weigel’s analysis dovetails with that of Third Way, a Democratic-aligned advocacy group, which found: “It’s clear that issues around transgender people were not decisive for swing voters [in 2022], but it turns out they also weren’t a driving force for Republicans. According to polling conducted by Navigator, only 20% of Republican voters cited keeping ‘transgender athletes out of girls’ sports teams’ and stopping the “promotion of transgender surgeries on our children” as one of the biggest reasons they voted for Republican candidates.”

In Michigan following the 2022 election that saw Democrats seize uniform control of the House, Senate and Governorship for the first time in 40 years, a GOP post-mortem found that “There were more ads on transgender sports than inflation, gas prices and bread and butter issues that could have swayed independent voters. We did not have a turnout problem – middle-of-the-road voters simply didn’t like what [we] was selling.”

Data suggest that other issues (such as the economy, crime, abortion etc.) have far greater sway with voters than whether trans women can play sports, yet this is not what GOP consultants seem to believe.

The irony is that the issue in many places has already been decided, and on terrain favorable to Republicans. Half the states already ban trans girls from girls high school sports, while sports bodies like the NCAA and those that are Olympics sports have enacted policies that all but ban trans women from competing.

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