In the hours and days after Kamala Harris lost the presidential election to Donald Trump, some liberals looked for scapegoats. Representative Tom Suozzi of New York settled on one group right away: trans people. “The Democrats have to stop pandering to the far left,” he told the New York Times on Wednesday. “I don’t want to discriminate against anybody, but I don’t think biological boys should be playing in girls’ sports.” A day later, Representative Seth Moulton of Massachusetts echoed the sentiment. “Democrats spend way too much time trying not to offend anyone rather than being brutally honest about the challenges many Americans face,” he said in an interview with the Times. “I have two little girls. I don’t want them getting run over on a playing field by a male or formerly male athlete, but as a Democrat, I’m supposed to be afraid to say that.”
A top aide to Moulton resigned over the comments, but the representative doubled down on Sunday, telling CNN that he was speaking “authentically as a parent” and that congressional colleagues told him that he was right, that “we try to cancel people rather than actually having debates about issues that Americans care about.” Some liberals agree. Before Gilberto Hinojosa resigned as chair of the Texas Democratic Party, he blamed trans rights in part for the party’s devastating showing in the state. Democrats, he said, have a choice. “You could, for example, you can support transgender rights up and down all the categories where the issue comes up, or you can understand that there’s certain things that we just go too far on, that a big bulk of our population does not support,” he added. He later apologized for the remarks on X.
Trump and the Republican Party had bet that trans rights would split the Democratic coalition. For weeks it was impossible to watch a professional football game in the U.S. without seeing ads claiming that Harris would be a president for “they/them” while Trump is “for you.” After the election, Blueprint, a moderate Democratic pollster, presented findings that claimed that many Trump voters believe Harris “is focused more on cultural issues like transgender issues rather than helping the middle class.” Blueprint’s phrasing was “hopelessly double (triple?) barreled,” according to John Sides, a professor of political science at Vanderbilt University, meaning that it is still difficult to assess the issue’s relevance to the outcome of the election. Absent a satisfying explanation for Harris’s loss, liberals who blame trans people for the failures of the Democratic Party betray their own prejudices — and lack moral clarity, too.
Attacks on trans people won’t help Democrats win elections, but they will plunge a vulnerable community into greater danger. Transgender Americans were “over four times more likely” than cisgender people to experience violence like sexual assault, rape, and aggravated or simple assault, the Williams Institute at UCLA found in 2021. Trans and nonbinary people are more likely to live in poverty, more likely to be food insecure, and more likely to be out of work, according to a 2022 study cited by CNN in July. When we’re talking about poor and working-class Americans, that includes trans people, and they deserve a vision, too. A party that works for all people must include trans people.
But it’s on Democrats to prove the case, and thus far they haven’t done so. Consider Trump’s ads. If they had an effect, the Democratic Party must bear the blame, and not because they’re too far left. Harris tacked right almost as soon as she got in the race. The Times reported that she frequently sought economic advice from her brother-in-law Tony West, who took leave from his role as Uber’s general counsel to assist her campaign. Though West had little experience on economic policy, he and Harris adviser Brian Nelson “were in frequent contact with business executives and Wall Street donors during the campaign,” the Times added. The result was a vision that never cohered, as Harris tried to inject populism into business-friendly policy and failed to produce anything meaningful. Harris’s muddled economic message arguably lent Trump’s attacks greater potency. Because she didn’t offer voters a persuasive alternative, many came to believe that she’d work for people who weren’t like them.
Even so, the Democratic Party’s problems did not start with Harris or with her economic policy, or with a few pro-trans remarks that she made before she ran for president. The party’s inconsistency — its refusal to reliably champion working Americans — left trans people vulnerable to attacks from the right. Had voters believed that Democrats would lower the costs of housing or health care or other basic necessities, perhaps Harris would have won, or at least run a closer race. Instead she courted elites, as generations of Democrats have done before her, and handed the country to an aspiring tyrant.
Now some Democrats and their liberal supporters would rather help Trump divide the working class against itself than admit the party failed. Liberals project their own intellectual and moral failings onto the left, which they accuse of rigidity and a certain wishful thinking. When Maureen Dowd wrote that “woke is broke” in her post-election diatribe, she imagined a country that is nothing more than a mirror of herself. When the hosts of Morning Joe read her column on air in its tedious entirety, they revealed themselves, not some hidden truth in the national soul. Their conclusions are far too convenient to be realistic. How lucky for Dowd that voters share her exact biases, that their enemies are her enemies and their fears her fears.
Democrats need to deal with the electorate they have, but they can and should do so without denigrating trans and nonbinary people. Liberals and electeds who say the party should move further to the right do so because they aren’t interested in serving the working class. They’d rather absolve themselves while avoiding the hard work of introspection. That way lies a political dead end. If the Democratic Party is to be fit for purpose, it will have to offer voters real answers, not technocracy or elitism or scapegoats. Trans people didn’t cost Democrats the election. Liberals did that all by themselves.
