For three straight elections, the institutions of the mainstream press have covered Democratic campaigns and policymaking with the expectation and implication that the right’s messaging on cultural issues would largely succeed. And for three straight elections, the anticipated general backlash against cultural progressivism has utterly failed to materialize. Standing against all available evidence—the proof, in surveys and election results, that the electorate had moved measurably left on issues like racial justice, LGBT rights, and immigration over the last decade, the clear tendency of Republican politicians, unlike their Democratic counterparts, to embrace their party’s least popular ideas, like overturning Roe—the center and the right have been locked in a cycle of mutual delusion.
The mainstream press’s dogged insistence that most voters are alienated by the push for transgender rights in particular was belied by the right’s failure—not the first—to take electoral advantage of the issue space this cycle. Republican candidates and conservative groups spent an estimated $50 million on anti-LGBT ads, much of it dedicated to messaging on trans children specifically. They had little to show for it in campaigns across most of the country; in Michigan, where Democrats swept statewide races and secured their first trifecta in decades, state GOP chief of staff Paul Cordes lamented that gubernatorial candidate Tudor Dixon had seemingly pushed more ads on trans athletes “than inflation, gas prices and bread and butter issues that could have swayed independent voters.”