“Anti-trans politics was a flop this election,” out transgender Rep. Sarah McBride (D-DE) said in a Monday press briefing, which LGBTQ Nation attended, referring to the over $400 million Republicans spent on anti-trans ads in the midterm elections. Exit polling conducted by Greenberg Quinlan Rosner (GQR), a political public opinion research group, backs up McBride’s assertion.
During the briefing, GQR senior partner Anna Greenberg cited her company’s election-eve survey
of 750 voters nationwide, which focused on the role that trans issues played and was consistent with exit polling data. GQR’s survey found that 47% of voters saw ads criticizing Democrats for “allowing people who were born as men or transgender people to compete in women’s sports” or “allowing gender changing surgery on children” (including 72% of voters in Ohio and 66% of voters in Texas).
Related
When asked if they wanted to hear more, less, or the same about trans issues during the election, 65% of voters said they wanted to hear less about trans issues and 14% said they wanted to hear more.
Comparatively, 62% wished they’d heard more about the cost of living, 62% wanted to hear more about fraud and wasting taxpayer money, 52% wanted to hear more about politicians getting rich in office, 42% wanted to hear more about data centers or Iran, 40% wanted to hear more about AI, and 32% wanted to hear more about immigration.
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When asked whether the Republicans’ “obsession with transgender people and children is strange and over the top,” 58% of voters agreed, a higher number than the percentage of people who voted for Democrats in Congress — that includes 61% of young men and 62% of independent voters.
When asked why they supported Republican candidates, only 3% of people who voted Republican mentioned trans issues, only 2% mentioned trans people participating in women’s sports, and 1% mentioned gender-affirming surgery for children.
“Not only [are anti-trans ads] ineffective,” Greenberg said, “not only do a majority of people think it’s strange and over the top, but most people don’t want to hear anything else about it. And I think obviously the election results speak for themselves in terms of the power of that issue.”
“The other side bet on $400 million of anti-trans ads,” Human Rights Campaign President Kelley Robinson said during the briefing. “It was an effort to distract voters from the affordability crisis, and it backfired.” Even Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) said trans issues didn’t motivate voters, she noted.
LGBTQ Nation asked HRC via email how the organization arrived at the $400 million number, and a spokesperson said that it was based on their tabulation of data from AdImpact and included campaigns from the entire country. It includes about $240 million spent on broadcast TV advertising, $100 million on cable, and over $50 million on online ads.
McBride agreed with Robinson, stating, “The overwhelming majority of ads by Democratic candidates, both incumbents and soon-to-be new members, rejected the Republican framing of [trans] issues…. Republicans were once again employing a tired strategy — as old as politics itself — to divide and misdirect the public’s attention, to tell them that their neighbor, their trans neighbor, their immigrant neighbor, was to blame for their challenges in life, rather than the wealthiest 1% that were rigging an economy to serve them and their friends at everyone else’s expense. But what I saw was that voters across this country, including my great state of Delaware, saw through that strategy.”
“Anti-trans politics was a flop this election. They were a flop in 2025,” she continued. “The American people are tired of a politics of cruelty that does nothing to lower costs or address corruption throughout our society…. That is what voters want. They want politicians that recognize that we are all in the same boat, that a rising tide lifts all of us, and that our destiny is inextricably linked.”
McBride and Robinson expressed gratitude that many elected Democrats demonstrated that (in Robinson’s words) “you don’t have to sacrifice your values or the trans community to win big.”
However, acknowledging the success of anti-trans ballot measures in blue states — including a gender-affirming care ban for youth in Colorado, and Colorado and Washington voting to ban trans kids from school sports — Robinson said, “We’ve made it through the battle, but we’re not at the end of this war.”
While she expects Republicans and conservatives to continue to weaponize queer and trans lives for political gain, she noted that the fight to win same-sex marriage took about 30 years. Over that time, the federal government passed the so-called Defense of Marriage Act, a law forbidding any federal recognition of same-sex couples, and 32 states held36 ballot measures to prohibit same-sex marriage; of them, 33 were approved, and three were defeated.
Now, federal legislators from both parties voted for the 2022 Respect for Marriage Act (which repealed DOMA), and 60% of voters in Virginia supported amending their state constitution to protect marriage equality.
“I think that we’ll be successful if we shorten the time that it takes to get to full equality for trans folks too, to shifting hearts and minds, and laws and policy as well,” Robinson said.
“I also believe that after the anti-marriage bans passed in states in the late ’90s and early 2000s, it was the first time that people really saw the harm that was happening to their friends and their neighbors. More people told their stories. More people showed up and said what the impact was on their lives, the ways that their rights weren’t the same as others. I think that we’re having that same moment now,” she continued.
“One of the repercussions of [Republicans’ anti-trans] ads is that people are starting to see the cruelty that is happening for trans people, the levels of violence that they’re experiencing, the challenges in getting healthcare, the challenges in bullying that kids are facing in schools, sometimes at the hands of adults, and they do not like it,” Robinson said.
“So, in this moment where more people are actually talking about trans lives than ever, I think the opportunity and responsibility in front of us is to make sure that those messages that they get don’t continue to be messages of fear and of hate and of chaos, but instead they’re they’re messages of empathy and of love…. Now, I think, is a great moment for anyone that’s a member of the community that is brave enough and safe enough to come out to tell their story, and especially anyone that’s an ally to the community, that can say that they love a trans person, they’ve got a trans person in their family, and what it means for them to show up and support them. It’s critically important right now.”
Over the next two years, Robinson said the biggest priorities for congressional Democrats include the following:
- Passing the Equality Act to make sure that there are non-discrimination protections for our full community, “because if you can be fired for who you are at work, that’s an economic issue.”
- Restore the funding for HIV care and research, housing, and Medicaid, starting with the December 11th funding deadline.
- Holding this Trump administration accountable, starting with Pete Hegseth, the defense secretary who has prioritized kicking out trans troops.
On the state level, she encouraged newly elected Democrats to remove any anti-LGBTQ+ language and policies from their laws and constitutions.
“Look, [LGBTQ+ voters] are 12% of the electorate today,” Robinson noted. “Estimates show that by 2040, we will be 20% of the electorate, one in five of every voter. That demographic change means nothing if our voices cannot be heard and if our votes cannot be counted. So, a big piece of what we’re doing is also ensuring that Democrats, especially, but really any ally, anyone that cares about equality, knows that democracy and protecting it is a key priority of the LGBTQ+ community.”
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