Redburn Reads (Oct. 27, 2024)

Will our better angels prevail?

Living in Massachusetts, I rarely see national political ads. But watching the World Series on Saturday night, I finally saw Trump’s anti-trans pitch attacking Kalama Harris for her past support for treatment of prisoners and for supposedly favoring allowing transgendered men to compete in sports against women. 

I don’t know if Trump’s ad will be effective, but his campaign advisers clearly think it will be, since they are running it repeatedly in a number of battleground states. And that is just one more thing to be depressed about as the election nears:  is this really a country where such an issue can animate enough voters to tip the election to Trump and his MAGA supporters in Congress?

Emily Elconin for The New York Times

Writing for The Bulwark, Mark Caputo tries to understand why Trump is placing such a big bet on the issue. 

IS IT THE ECONOMY STUPID? Not for Donald Trump’s presidential campaign. These days, its closing message on TV may as well be “it’s the trans, you fools.”

In the past five weeks, Trump’s operation has spent more than $29 million on TV ads criticizing Vice President Kamala Harris for supporting transgender surgeries for inmates and illegal immigrants in detention, according to data from the media tracking firm AdImpact. That makes the topic, by far, the biggest focal point when it comes to Trump’s ad spending—one of the best barometers of messaging priority there is. By contrast, the campaign has spent $5 million over that same time period on TV ads on the economy, making that topic their fifth-most emphasized.

The campaign’s elevation of transgender issues above the economy constitutes one of the biggest bets in presidential politics. The former rates as among the least important to voters according to public opinion polls; the latter their top concern. The trans-heavy focus also seems to conflict with months of insistence—from the Trump campaign to the pundit class—that the ex-president will win because of inflation and jobs.

Executing such a gambit at this late stage of the campaign represents a major roll of the dice: one that could either reset culture war politics for years to come in presidential races or, if Trump loses, go down as a major, even historic, tactical blunder.

But Trump pollster John McLaughlin said that viewing the campaign’s emphasis on trans issues as a tradeoff with its focus on the economy represents a shallow understanding of “asymmetrical political warfare.” Presidential races aren’t as much battles over policy plans, he said, as they are character contests.

“In that character contrast, these cultural issues become symbols of those characters,” McLaughlin said. “They don’t have to be the top issue, but they have to make a values-connection with a majority of voters, and this is symbolic of why her character doesn’t connect with a majority of voters.”

They come as Trump is grappling with vulnerabilities of his own. The ex-president has repeatedly stumbled on abortion—a losing issue for him—and endured a withering assault from Harris and her allies who describe him as dangerous, unstable, loony, too old, a dictator wannabe, a crook, and a felon with a penchant for sexual assault.

On Wednesday night, those same attacks came to a head. At a CNN town hall, Harris called Trump a “fascist” and repeatedly noted that his former chief of staff said he praised Hitler’s generals. 

The Harris campaign declined to comment. But Steve Schale, who leads the pro-Harris super PAC Unite the Country, expressed a measure of concern over the effectiveness of Trump’s ad blitz. He noted that it seemed derived from the playbook that Trump’s leadership team of Susie Wiles and pollster Tony Fabrizio used when they led Florida Gov. Rick Scott’s scorched-earth 2010 gubernatorial campaign.

“I’ve been up against the Susie playbook and learned how it works the hard way. It’s pretty simple: drive up the negatives on the opponent to [the] point that the choice comes down to one thing that her candidate has an advantage on—in this case, the economy,” Schale said. “I suspect that’s what’s going on here with their ad strategy—driving Harris negatives down into the barrel with Trump—and that’s a real thing my side has to guard against.”

An adviser to the Trump campaign, who spoke on condition of anonymity to describe internal discussions, said Fabrizio was initially concerned about advertising so heavily about trans issues, but the campaign’s research showed it moved voters. The adviser also conceded that Schale was right about the campaign’s strategy, which was rooted in principles that Fabrizio and fellow Trump pollster McLaughlin learned at the feet of Arthur Finkelstein, an adviser to Richard Nixon.

“They’re trying to make [Trump] a crook,” the adviser explained. “But Tony and John were understudies of Arthur Finkelstein and as he used to say: crook beats fool.”

IN CONTRAST TO HER 2020 PRESIDENTIAL CAMPAIGN, Harris has been mum about trans issues in this race. But when pressed on the matter in a contentious interview last week on Fox News, she pointed to a New York Times story that detailed how the Bureau of Prisons during Trump’s presidency began offering “gender affirming care” under court order.

“I will follow the law, and it’s a law that Donald Trump actually followed,” she said. “Now it’s a public report that under Donald Trump’s administration, these surgeries were available to, on a medical necessity basis, to people in the federal prison system.”

Only two inmates have received transgender surgery in the federal prison system, starting in 2022, according to the Times. The Bureau of Prisons did not return a call or email for confirmation or comment. California’s Department of Corrections also did not respond Wednesday to a records request for the number of transgender surgeries it has provided. But advocates say one reason it’s hard to know how many prison inmates and undocumented immigrants in detention have received transgender therapies is because it’s such a small subset of people.

Trump also mentions the issue repeatedly on the trail, often raising the specter of children undergoing transition-related surgeries at their schools. U.S. Senate candidates like Eric Hovde in Wisconsin and Texas Sen. Ted Cruz have followed suit. Their opponents, Wisconsin Sen. Tammy Baldwin and Texas Rep. Collin Allred, responded with ads calling the Republicans liars.

The saturation spending by Republicans has appalled trans advocates, who worry it has made trans Americans political pariahs and punching bags. To counter that, the nonprofit trans advocacy group GRACE launched a counteroffensive this week by releasing a new digital ad featuring an Army veteran who opposed home-state politicians in South Carolina interfering with his family’s healthcare decisions concerning his trans child. The advocacy group GLAAD and its partner organization Ground Media have also begun an ad series of their own.

On Thursday, Ground Media unveiled a study it had conducted showing that Trump’s first trans-related ad had not improved his political standing, but had hurt perceptions of trans people.

"What this demonstrates is that attacking the trans community isn’t just a weak and feckless political strategy—it’s a deeply cynical one,” David Rochkind, CEO of Ground Media, said in a written statement. “These ads weaponize trans-identity to sow fear and division, making our country less safe for everyone.”

The Harris campaign has its own cultural issue – abortion –  which, in contrast to Trump’s anti-trans phobia, emphasizes leaving people to make decisions about their health and their personal lives without interference from politicians and the government. And, according to a an insightful analysis by Matthew Yglesias, supporting women’s reproductive rights is probably the best argument for Democrats to make in the closing days of the campaign.

I have a pretty simple model for keeping track of who’s winning and who’s losing in any discourse battle leading up to the 2024 election. If we're talking about abortion rights, or health care more broadly, or January 6, then we’re playing Kamala Harris’s game and she’s winning. But if we’re talking about immigration, inflation, or Joe Biden, then we’re playing Donald Trump’s game and he’s winning.

You don’t need to think this is fair.

The US has had the strongest inflation-adjusted growth in the world, and Biden and his team (despite some mistakes) deserve credit for that, not blame. And the good news is that if you compare Democrats’ current standing to almost any other rich country’s incumbent party, they are actually in great shape. The problem is that they’re still in bad shape. Time spent arguing this point is time wasted. Time spent talking about women dying after delayed care due to abortion bans or the tradeoff between tax breaks for the rich versus health insurance for working people is time well spent. . . 

Which is not to say that I think Democrats, or the broader progressive community, should ignore every issue outside of health care and January 6. Sometimes you need to talk about what’s in the news or what people are interested in. But the right strategy is to try to tie things back to your best topics. For example, it’s interesting that we have breaking news about Mitch McConnell’s awareness of Trump’s low character, but I think the most important thing for Americans to know is that at the end of the day, McConnell and Trump worked together to overturn Roe, to raise the deficit with tax breaks for the rich, and to try to take health insurance away from millions of working families — a gambit they will try again if they win in November.

Democrats are spending hundreds of millions of dollars this cycle on radio, television, and digital ads that have been tested for their persuasiveness. But while this kind of paid media is important, it’s ultimately much less influential than what people see in the news or hear from their friends.

And to that extent, I want to differentiate my position from those who say that news media coverage of Trump doesn’t matter. What I want to say is that it matters in a different way from how a lot of liberals seem to think it matters. Getting TV and newspapers to say “TRUMP IS A REALLY BAD GUY” louder is unlikely to make a difference. What does make a difference is if voters’ general sense is that abortion rights and health care are at stake, and that Democrats generally prioritize the economic interests of the middle class over those of the rich. . .

On abortion, the public currently faces a binary choice between two parties, both of which they find somewhat extreme. But that doesn’t mean they feel equally about the two parties. Forced to choose between a party that would maybe permit some abortions they don’t approve of, and a party that will force millions of women into unwanted and potentially deadly pregnancies, they strongly prefer Democrats. To the extent that Republicans sometimes have to talk about abortion, it’s of course best for them to highlight late-term issues. But whatever Republicans are saying about abortion, they’re still talking about abortion and they’re still the abortion-banning party. Most voters disagree with them.

What’s more, the longer any discussion of abortion rights goes on — whether on a television panel or in a comments section or among friends — the greater the odds that someone on the anti-abortion side will let slip that they think Democrats are “baby killers” or “abortion is murder.” It almost always ends as a potent reminder that conservatives’ conscience forbids leaving this up to the states and ultimately requires them to commit egregious invasions of privacy — investigating routine miscarriages as potential homicides, monitoring pregnant women’s interstate travel, and many other things that no sane GOP politician would talk about in public.. .

At the same time, it’s important to remember that Trump’s absolute low point in the polls came when the news was dominated by Affordable Care Act repeal. There’s a reason Musk is always so vague when he brags that he and Trump are going to cut “waste.” There’s a reason the Free Press’s culture war coverage rarely addresses abortion. There’s a reason frontline Democrats’ ads all acknowledge voter concerns about the cost of living and then pivot to reducing health care costs. Progressives can’t single-handedly control what gets covered in the media and what goes viral. But everyone — from elected officials and nonprofit workers and academics to journalists and people with mid-sized social media followings and even just people who read and click on the internet — all have some agency here. And down the stretch, you’re either trying to steer the national conversation in a productive direction, or you aren’t.

Michelle Obama is steering the national conversation in a productive direction. Here’s what Rebecca Davis O’Brien and Nicholas Nehamas wrote in the New York Times after Ms. Obama’s speech on Saturday night in Kalamazoo, Mich.

Michelle Obama issued an impassioned plea to American voters on Saturday — and, in particular, American men — anchored in a searing and intimate depiction of women’s bodies and reproductive health, and what she described as the life-or-death stakes of returning former President Donald J. Trump to power.

In her first appearance on the campaign trail during this election, Mrs. Obama, long reluctant to engage in the political arena, described the far-reaching consequences of the 2022 Supreme Court decision overturning the constitutional right to abortion, in the concrete terms of personal tragedy.

“If your wife is shivering and bleeding on the operating room table during a routine delivery gone bad, her pressure dropping as she loses more and more blood, or some unforeseen infection spreads and her doctors aren’t sure if they can act, you will be the one praying that it’s not too late,” Mrs. Obama said. “You will be the one pleading for somebody, anybody, to do something.”. . .

Mrs. Obama’s words — at a rally in Michigan where she introduced Vice President Kamala Harris — amounted to an extraordinary centering of women’s bodies and their private experiences in an American presidential election. She discussed menstrual cramps and hot flashes, describing the shame and uncertainty girls and women feel about their bodies. She told women they should demand to be treated as more than “baby-making vessels.”

And she castigated the media and many voters for holding Ms. Harris to a higher standard than her opponent, for “choosing to ignore Donald Trump’s gross incompetence, while asking Kamala to dazzle us at every turn.”

“We expect her to be intelligent and articulate, to have a clear set of policies, to never show too much anger, to prove time and time again that she belongs,” Mrs. Obama said. “But for Trump, we expect nothing at all, no understanding of policy, no ability to put together a coherent argument, no honesty, no decency, no morals.” . . .

With the election 10 days away, Ms. Harris is facing an electorate deeply divided by gender. A majority of women support her. A majority of men are backing Mr. Trump. Her joint appearance with Mrs. Obama in Michigan seemed designed both to energize her female supporters and jolt men into understanding what she believes is at risk.

Which means we need, in battleground states, for women to outvote men this year. There are a lot of things that I think need fixing in our political system (more on that in a future RR), but for now what we really need is for our better angels to prevail.