Republicans’ Anti-Transgender Attacks Didn’t Work This Election. They Still Want to Use the Playbook in 2026.

Republicans went all in on anti-trans messaging for the 2025 election, inspired by President Donald Trump’s effective “Kamala is for they/them” ad.

It didn’t work — and now Republicans are trying to figure out why, and who is to blame.

In Virginia and in New Jersey, both Winsome Earle-Sears and Jack Ciattarelli made trans issues a key part of their campaigns, only to be defeated by their Democratic opponents, Abigail Spanberger and Mikie Sherrill.

For some, the problem was not the issue itself but the candidates that were delivering the message. Sean Spicer, former chief strategist for the Republican National Committee and White House press secretary, told NOTUS over text that anti-trans messaging is “probably 80/20” — meaning he believes most people support the Republican position. But ”that was not the issue” in the races, Spicer said.

“Candidates matter, campaigns matter,” he added. “The Republicans need to be reminded.”

James Blair, a White House deputy chief of staff and former political director of Trump’s 2024 campaign, however, told Politico that it was both gubernatorial candidates, particularly Earles-Sears, misreading voters’ priorities.

“Over half of Winsome Sears’ ads talked about transgender. And it’s not even the top five issues, according to voters,” Blair said.

Terry Schilling, president of the conservative American Principles Project, which spent $2.5 million in New Jersey and Virginia “to expose radical Democrats’ support for gender insanity,” told NOTUS that the issue was the states in play:

“Let’s be clear — Virginia, New Jersey and New York are solid blue territories. There were no surprises Tuesday night.”

APP is still compiling data on the impact of the ads they put out in each race, but Schilling said that plans to run ads against Sen. Jon Ossoff in Georgia and Roy Cooper in North Carolina are still on.

“Both Spanberger and Sherrill spent most of their campaign dodging the issue entirely. I truly hope Democrats refuse to learn the lesson about transgender extremism because it will lead to Republicans expanding our majorities in 2026,” Schilling continued.

A post-election memo obtained by NOTUS from the Democratic public affairs firm Global Strategy Group found that “anti-trans ads, like most attack ads, can have an impact in the absence of a response, depressing Democratic support by 3–4 points.” The memo added that Republicans anti-trans messaging can “compound existing frustrations voters have about the Democratic Party and exacerbate anxieties that have to do with much more than issues surrounding transgender rights.”

“However, when candidates inoculate early and respond directly, they recover those points and sometimes gain additional margin by demonstrating their values and strength,” the memo continued.

In response to Earle-Sears’ ads claiming Spanberger “voted to allow men in girls’ sports, bathrooms and locker rooms” and that she is “for they/them not for us,” Spanberger released an ad titled “Mom.” Spanberger started the ad by saying she was a “mom to three girls in public school.”

“As a law enforcement officer, I went after child predators, so it really angers me to hear these lies about who I am,” the former House lawmaker said in the ad. “I believe we need to get politics out of our schools, and trust parents and local communities. As a mom and as your governor, I will be focused on making our schools the best in the nation.”

Similarly, Sherrill’s allies released ads saying Ciattarelli “protected predators and sex offenders — not your kids.”

The GSG memo found that voters in focus groups saw Spanberger as “tough but fair” and “focused on real issues,” and Sherrill as “a parent who gets it,” crediting her for talking about kids’ well-being instead of “niche topics.”

A CNN exit poll found that 50% of voters in Virginia found that “support for trans rights in society” had “gone too far,” but 23% of those ended up voting for Spanberger. In New Jersey, 45% said they thought “support for trans rights in society” had “gone too far,” with 17% of those respondents voting for Sherrill.

Democrats had broadly avoided trans issues after the 2024 election, claiming they were caught flat-footed by Republicans’ focus on the issues during last year’s presidential race. But Tuesday’s wins, Democrats say, gave them a blueprint on how to handle these attacks as they prepare for next year’s midterm elections.

Rep. Sarah McBride, who has been leading Democrats on how to respond to anti-trans efforts both publicly and privately, told reporters in a press call with the Human Rights Campaign that “one of the mistakes we too often saw in 2024 was that candidates didn’t respond in, really, any way to these attacks.”

“What we saw, especially in Virginia, is that Gov.-elect Spanberger, she was ready. She put money behind a response ad that demonstrated her bonafides and her commitment to safety for all children in the Commonwealth of Virginia, and that ad helped to neutralize the barrage of ads from Lt. Gov. Winsome Sears,” McBride continued.

“That is a lesson for all of us moving forward: We cannot stick our heads in the sand and try to ignore these attacks,” she added.

Though as effective as it was for Spanberger and Sherrill, their approach may be hard to duplicate. Adrienne Kimmell, a messaging strategist familiar with GSG’s research, told NOTUS that the two gubernatorial candidates “by complete coincidence, are in some ways a similar profile: mom, law enforcement background, woman.”

Will the message “be effective with a male candidate? We haven’t been able to really experiment with that,” Kimmell continued.

The clear conclusion, Kimmell said, was that Democrats “have to respond” and “people need to see and hear that response. It can’t just be someone whispering to someone else. It has to be heard by the voters who are also being exposed to these attacks.”

Imara Jones, a prominent trans activist and CEO of TransLash Media, a media organization focused on covering trans people, told NOTUS that the way Republicans deployed anti-trans messaging seemed like they were just “trying to throw something at the wall.”

The purpose of Trump’s “they/them” ad, for example, was to isolate former Vice President Kamala Harris, Jones said. It highlighted her support for gender-affirming care for trans inmates to suggest she was not focused on issues that mattered more to voters. (A 2024 exit survey from the Democratic pollster Blueprint found that the top three reasons voters opposed Harris were high inflation, undocumented migrants crossing the border and “Kamala Harris is focused more on cultural issues like transgender issues rather than helping the middle class.”)

“What happened in 2024 is the trans messaging was actually part of a strategy that they had to reach a certain group of voters that they were trying to motivate to vote,” Jones said. “If their (Republicans’) lesson from 2024 is that this is just something that you can use to deploy and it’ll pull you out of tight races, I don’t really think that that’s the right lesson.”

But even as the anti-trans ads failed to deliver the wins that Republicans expected Tuesday, Jones said she sees the strategy returning in 2026: “They’re going to lean into it next year, it’s among the more popular policies that they’ve pushed. That’s a sign of the way in which everything else is so terribly unpopular,” she said.

But Democrats, at least for now, are rejoicing that they seemingly found a way to get through the attacks.

“Here’s what Republicans did,” House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries told reporters when asked by NOTUS how House Democratic leadership was advising candidates on how to handle that issue, “they spent 10s of millions of dollars trying to weaponize the transgender issue. It failed.”

That playbook, Jeffries continued, “spectacularly failed because Democrats are staying focused on the issues.”