Democrats are stuck someplace among their heart, mind, political aspirations, and the hard line on transgender issues, as the party is oscillating on the 0.5% issue (explained below) that generally doesn't measure that strongly with most Americans.
Like President Donald Trump said when urging Republicans from hard-line stances on the abortion issue: "You have to win elections first."
While some Democrats want to move off the focus on transgender issues for political expediency, others are conversely digging in further to avoid "capitulation" to Trump's base, The Washington Post reported.
As Democrats seek to pin Republicans as a party of hate for their lack of transgender issue concern, a lot of hate is spewed on Republicans for precisely that, one Democrat noted.
"It's a hard and really legitimate conversation for people to have and for communities to have," Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Conn., told the Post. "And I think this speaks to a broader problem that our party has. We look at people who, you know, don't line up with us on a host of social and cultural issues, and we judge them pretty harshly too often."
Polls show Republicans and independents represent more mainstream American views on transgender issues such as the opposition against biological males competing in girls' and women's sports, and Democrats fear it cost former Vice President Kamala Harris an election.
Trump's campaign ran on the mantra "Kamala is for they/them, President Trump is for you," and Republicans ran "$215 million on network TV ads" on transgender issues, including $115 million that specifically mentioned sports, the Post reported from AdImpact data.
Going all in for a group that represents just 0.5% of American adults, according to the UCLA School of Law's Williams Institute, is a tough way to campaign for votes.
"There's absolutely no question that Republicans were able to use this issue to paint Democrats as a whole, and the Harris campaign, as way outside the cultural mainstream," Third Way President and co-founder Jon Cowan, whose group is urging Democrats to back some restrictions on men in women's sports, told the Post.
"And since the election, there's been no kind of reckoning or redirection on the part of the party."
But the loud voices of the transgender community are apt to prey on Democrats' long-standing moral code.
"They're absolutely moving to the right," trans activist Charlotte Clymer, a Democrat operative, told the Post of her party.
"If not by specifically taking anti-trans positions, then by the increasing silence."
Simply, American voters aren't in the place of trans activists, Democrat strategist Mark Riddle noted to the Post, pointing to polls showing positive reception to potential 2028 Democrat presidential primary candidate Rahm Emanuel's statement: "I am done with the discussion of what locker room kids use. I am done with the discussion of bathrooms. We better start having a conversation about the classroom.”
"Voters want to move on from the culture wars," Riddle concluded.
Eric Mack ✉
Eric Mack has been a writer and editor at Newsmax since 2016. He is a 1998 Syracuse University journalism graduate and a New York Press Association award-winning writer.
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