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It’s hard to imagine a more niche issue than whether taxpayers should provide hormones and surgery for prisoners. A 2020 report from NBC found 4,890 transgender prisoners incarcerated in prisons across 45 states and D.C., a year in which 1.2 million people were incarcerated in state and federal prisons. Even if all of them had received surgery on the taxpayer dime (and the NBC report suggests that’s far from the truth), it would be a rounding error in our total spending on inmates.
So it’s kind of wild that the Trump campaign has posted on Instagram multiple ads attacking Kamala Harris using footage from a Transform the White House event in 2019, during which she talked up her efforts to secure surgeries for transgender prisoners. It’s part of a broader ad blitz that Trump and other Republicans have been running on trans issues in the closing weeks of the campaign. The tagline of the Trump ads is that Harris’s “agenda is they/them — not you.”
Could this possibly be effective, wondered an account I follow on X. After I watched the ads, I think that yes, they are. Not because many Americans lie awake at night wondering whether they’re paying for some prisoner’s vaginoplasty but because they help fill a void that Harris created with her cautious early campaigning.
Harris started out with some severe handicaps: low favorability, an unpopular boss and a history of taking positions so far to the left of the average voter that even her supporters tend to assume they’re conservative propaganda. The favorability problem has been mitigated with a charm offensive, but the other issues remain because Harris hasn’t given voters much to counteract them beyond a résumé and some vaguely aspirational language. I suspect that’s one reason her campaign seems to be flagging with the remaining undecided voters.
She could have addressed those problems head on by distancing herself from unpopular policies of President Joe Biden and from her own past pronouncements. Instead she tried to elide these deficits with a soft-focus campaign that seemed designed to avoid taking unpopular stands. Any backtracking was often accomplished by sending aides out to quietly spread the word.
That’s understandable. Throwing Biden under the bus would have raised administration hackles in the party, and if you try to explain why you’re abandoning your previous ideas, you’ll probably have to explain why you supported them in the first place. There’s some risk that in the course of executing such a hard pivot, you’ll bobble an interview, creating a viral moment that makes things worse. So the Harris campaign adopted a strategy of “least said, soonest mended.” It shunned journalists who might have asked inconvenient questions and crafted a message that was mostly vague uplift: Harris grew up middle class, she’s pragmatic, she loves America and small businesses and working families.
There’s nothing wrong with these platitudes, which are the verbal equivalent of a navy suit and red tie: attractive, inoffensive and ubiquitous. The problem is that like the navy suits, they are not distinctive and do not convey a sense of the person underneath the uniform.
Her supporters had no trouble conjuring an exciting figure from these wisps of sentiment. Kamala Harris was brat. She was the meme queen. She was joy. But if you were trying to figure out why you should vote for her — not just against Trump but for her — she hadn’t given you much to work with.
Voters want to know who politicians are. They know the 87-point policy plan will likely be changed or abandoned once in office, so they want to understand how politicians think and what they care about because that tells them what compromises politicians are likely to make and how they might react in unforeseen crises.
Donald Trump has given voters a clear picture of who he is and what he’s likely to do in office — a grimly unpresidential picture but at least one in sharp focus. Harris remains fuzzy by comparison. A former Obama official told the New Yorker’s Evan Osnos that his current firm spends tens of thousands of dollars every month on lobbyists and yet “all these fancy-pants people, former members of Congress, nobody can tell me conclusively what she believes about anything.”
The Harris campaign is asking swing voters to trade the devil they know for someone who seems less chaotic but also harder to read. Undecideds who aren’t content to fill in that hazy picture with memes about coconut trees will look for clues not in the heartwarming pablum of a stump speech but in what Harris has done and what causes she’s associated with.
For Harris, many of those cues are liabilities: She’s a California liberal associated with an unpopular administration. In a September New York Times poll, voters were significantly more likely to see Harris as too progressive than to see Trump as too conservative.
If that’s what you’re worried about, this ad is tailor made to reinforce your worst fears. Here is a picture of a convicted murderer; there is Harris bragging about how hard she worked to get prisoners surgery and about using “the power that I had” for “pushing forward the movement, frankly, and the agenda.”
Of course, you can argue that this is the only humane policy and that the ads are ugly and harsh. Which they are. But you have to be in a pretty thick political bubble not to understand that sex-reassignment surgery for murderers will strike a lot of people as insane. Though it probably isn’t an issue that many people vote on, it will make them wonder what other unpopular interest-group agendas Harris might push forward if they give her power. And because Harris hasn’t given them much sense of who she is and what she wants — other than the presidency — it’s hard for them to know where she’ll draw the line.
It’s hard to imagine a more niche issue than whether taxpayers should provide hormones and surgery for prisoners. A 2020 report from NBC found 4,890 transgender prisoners incarcerated in prisons across 45 states and D.C., a year in which 1.2 million people were incarcerated in state and federal prisons. Even if all of them had received surgery on the taxpayer dime (and the NBC report suggests that’s far from the truth), it would be a rounding error in our total spending on inmates.
So it’s kind of wild that the Trump campaign has posted on Instagram multiple ads attacking Kamala Harris using footage from a Transform the White House event in 2019, during which she talked up her efforts to secure surgeries for transgender prisoners. It’s part of a broader ad blitz that Trump and other Republicans have been running on trans issues in the closing weeks of the campaign. The tagline of the Trump ads is that Harris’s “agenda is they/them — not you.”
Could this possibly be effective, wondered an account I follow on X. After I watched the ads, I think that yes, they are. Not because many Americans lie awake at night wondering whether they’re paying for some prisoner’s vaginoplasty but because they help fill a void that Harris created with her cautious early campaigning.
Harris started out with some severe handicaps: low favorability, an unpopular boss and a history of taking positions so far to the left of the average voter that even her supporters tend to assume they’re conservative propaganda. The favorability problem has been mitigated with a charm offensive, but the other issues remain because Harris hasn’t given voters much to counteract them beyond a résumé and some vaguely aspirational language. I suspect that’s one reason her campaign seems to be flagging with the remaining undecided voters.
She could have addressed those problems head on by distancing herself from unpopular policies of President Joe Biden and from her own past pronouncements. Instead she tried to elide these deficits with a soft-focus campaign that seemed designed to avoid taking unpopular stands. Any backtracking was often accomplished by sending aides out to quietly spread the word.
That’s understandable. Throwing Biden under the bus would have raised administration hackles in the party, and if you try to explain why you’re abandoning your previous ideas, you’ll probably have to explain why you supported them in the first place. There’s some risk that in the course of executing such a hard pivot, you’ll bobble an interview, creating a viral moment that makes things worse. So the Harris campaign adopted a strategy of “least said, soonest mended.” It shunned journalists who might have asked inconvenient questions and crafted a message that was mostly vague uplift: Harris grew up middle class, she’s pragmatic, she loves America and small businesses and working families.
There’s nothing wrong with these platitudes, which are the verbal equivalent of a navy suit and red tie: attractive, inoffensive and ubiquitous. The problem is that like the navy suits, they are not distinctive and do not convey a sense of the person underneath the uniform.
Her supporters had no trouble conjuring an exciting figure from these wisps of sentiment. Kamala Harris was brat. She was the meme queen. She was joy. But if you were trying to figure out why you should vote for her — not just against Trump but for her — she hadn’t given you much to work with.
Voters want to know who politicians are. They know the 87-point policy plan will likely be changed or abandoned once in office, so they want to understand how politicians think and what they care about because that tells them what compromises politicians are likely to make and how they might react in unforeseen crises.
Donald Trump has given voters a clear picture of who he is and what he’s likely to do in office — a grimly unpresidential picture but at least one in sharp focus. Harris remains fuzzy by comparison. A former Obama official told the New Yorker’s Evan Osnos that his current firm spends tens of thousands of dollars every month on lobbyists and yet “all these fancy-pants people, former members of Congress, nobody can tell me conclusively what she believes about anything.”
The Harris campaign is asking swing voters to trade the devil they know for someone who seems less chaotic but also harder to read. Undecideds who aren’t content to fill in that hazy picture with memes about coconut trees will look for clues not in the heartwarming pablum of a stump speech but in what Harris has done and what causes she’s associated with.
For Harris, many of those cues are liabilities: She’s a California liberal associated with an unpopular administration. In a September New York Times poll, voters were significantly more likely to see Harris as too progressive than to see Trump as too conservative.
If that’s what you’re worried about, this ad is tailor made to reinforce your worst fears. Here is a picture of a convicted murderer; there is Harris bragging about how hard she worked to get prisoners surgery and about using “the power that I had” for “pushing forward the movement, frankly, and the agenda.”
Of course, you can argue that this is the only humane policy and that the ads are ugly and harsh. Which they are. But you have to be in a pretty thick political bubble not to understand that sex-reassignment surgery for murderers will strike a lot of people as insane. Though it probably isn’t an issue that many people vote on, it will make them wonder what other unpopular interest-group agendas Harris might push forward if they give her power. And because Harris hasn’t given them much sense of who she is and what she wants — other than the presidency — it’s hard for them to know where she’ll draw the line.
