This story originally appeared on Them.
The blue wave has finally reached shore.
On Tuesday, and in the days leading up to it, Americans made their voices heard at the ballot box. Polls across the country had indicated a resounding victory for Democrats that has materialized tonight in the form of a majority in the U.S. House and Senate. While midterm elections are often considered a referendum on the sitting president — Barack Obama faced an electoral “shellacking” in 2010 after his “Hope and Change”-fueled 2008 victory — this one had a different feeling. In many ways, the American people were fed up.
In polling leading up to the 2026 midterms, voters indicated that there were a host of issues that motivated them. Gallup polling showed Americans were concerned about the economy (87%), healthcare (77%), the worsening conflict in Iran (77%), income inequality (66%,) and still-too-high gas prices (62%). Notably absent from the list of top issues? Transgender people.
And yet Republicans poured $183 million in advertising on trans issues, according to the Associated Press. That money appears to have been wasted. While Tuesday’s Democratic victory is certainly a rebuttal to Republicans’ strategies for dealing with the country’s panoply of problems — for example, its overfunding of ICE and its food industry deregulation, which caused an economic catastrophe and transformed every supermarket aisle into a viral incubator this summer — it also marks a loud refusal to buy into Republicans’ argument that trans people are to blame for everyday issues. In race after race nationwide, rather than face the country’s toughest problems, the GOP has instead asked voters to “Look over there!” and hope that issues such as gender-affirming care, trans athletes, and pronouns will shore up enough support to keep its grip on its current electoral power.
Tonight, it largely didn’t work, shaming Republicans who bet big on the strategy and raising questions about Democrats who capitulated in advance.
In the 2026 election cycle, almost every high-profile Democratic candidate, especially ones associated with the Democratic Socialists of America, have faced accusations that they were too close, friendly with, or accepting of trans Americans, gender non-conforming people, drag queens, and other scary queer people.
Trump sycophant Laura Loomer attempted to stall Angie Nixon’s ascent in the Florida polls by pointing out that she had once danced — Loomer called it “twerking” — at a drag show. Republicans enlisted the help of artificial intelligence to add deepfakes of drag performers to video of a barn dance held by Democratic House hopeful Jamie Ager to present it as being closer to a Pink Pony Club-esque affair than a downhome good time. The drag performers later filed a cease and desist order against the Republican funders behind the video, and said they never even attended the event. Ager won tonight, flipping the seat.
In Mississippi, incumbent Cindy Hyde-Smith began referring to her challenger Scott Colom as the “Transgender Defender.” At the time of this writing, with 87% of the vote counted late Tuesday night, Hyde-Smith was only leading Colom by a little over 1%.
Perhaps no Democratic candidate faced fiercer opposition for his stance on trans people than Texas’s James Talarico, who led Paxton in the days leading up to the election and won tonight.The GOP pounced on Talarico’s initial full-throated support of trans youth. In May, White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller called Talarico the Democrats’ “first transgender Senate candidate.” A month later, Republicans ran a bizarre fake AI ad that featured Talarico singing a Sound of Music-inspired number that claimed that trans kids were some of his “favorite things.” His opponent, staunchly anti-trans state Attorney General, Ken Paxton launched a deepfaked ad in September that featured Talarico, a seminarian, delivering a sermon that never happened about LGBTQ+ equality. A month later, Vice President J.D. Vance — who once dressed in drag and separately dressed as Dumbledore, who is notably a gay wizard, for Halloween — intimated that Talarico was gay and slammed him for naming Texan RuPaul’s Drag Race alum Alyssa Edwards as his favorite drag queen.
The GOP assault on Talarico, in some ways, succeeded. Talarico recalibrated. While he didn’t pull back his support of trans youth entirely, he did label some of his past comments “cringey” and said he “missed the mark.” He also equivocated, saying that he would support restrictions on trans student athletes meant to protect “safety or fairness,” and going out of his way to clarify he opposes surgeries for trans minors, which are already exceedingly rare. Talarico’s victory proves, perhaps, that he never had to make those concessions.
Talarico was not alone in distancing himself from trans issues, either. Plenty of Democrats went on the defensive, throwing trans constituents under the bus, with some suddenly espousing rhetoric that made them sound like they were running on a GOP ticket. Iowa Democratic Senate candidate Josh Turek ran an ad in which he said he didn’t support trans athletes playing on teams that match their gender identity and opposed Medicaid funding for gender-affirming care. (Both sides of the aisle lambasted him for it.) When Trump used an anti-trans slur to label South Carolina Democrat Annie Andrews as “Trannie Annie,” she responded with an ad saying, “I don’t support biological men playing women’s sports.” Andrews and Turek may have thought they needed to throw trans women under the bus to prevail, but both won tonight by fairly comfortable margins.
How we got to this particular electoral environment, in which every down-ballot Dem now has to have a stance on trans issues in order to seek office, isn’t hard to parse. Trans issues have been at the center of the Republican electoral strategy for at least three election cycles now. But the shift to an anti-trans politic has an even older origin.
In 2015, the Supreme Court effectively ended the nationwide debate on same-sex marriage, when it made marriage equality the law of the land through its Obergefell v. Hodges decision. With that issue put to bed — at least temporarily, as many Republicans have been signaling a desire to overturn the decision, though the Supreme Court seems disinterested — Republicans turned to another culture war issue in order to keep turning out a core component of their base: evangelicals.
“They have an interest in keeping the base riled up about one thing or another, and when one issue fades, as with same-sex relationships and same-sex marriage, they’ve got to find something else,” Randall Balmer, a Dartmouth professor and author of the book Bad Faith told The 19th in 2022. “It’s almost frantic.” (White evangelical Protestants are the most vital religious constituency in the Republican party, per the Public Religion Research Institute.)
Post-Obergefell, trans rights became the next culture wars frontier. North Carolina’s 2016 House Bill 2, a “bathroom bill” that proved highly controversial and led several prominent businesses to flee North Carolina after its passage. (The law was eventually repealed.)
HB 2 proved hugely unpopular, but while bathroom bills may have been a no-go at the time, the GOP moved into trickier territory and, by 2021, efforts to curb trans rights had ramped up in several other arenas. Just five months into 2021, legislatures across the country had passed the most anti-LGBTQ+ bills ever in one year, with six of them limiting trans youth participation in sports. The next year became, once again, the year with the most anti-LGBTQ+ bills ever passed, with2023 following suit. Over 300 anti-LGBTQ+ bills were filed in statehouses in January 2024 alone, and despite numbers of anti-LGBTQ+ and anti-trans bills growing every year, 2025 saw another surge, with over 125 bills passed, per the Trans Legislation Tracker, and 500 more proposed by May of 2026.
While these laws were bubbling up in statehouses, the issue became a major factor in the 2024 presidential election between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris. During that cycle, Republicans debuted the “Kamala is for they/them” ad, which aired more than 30,0000 times in key swing states, per NPR. According to an analysis from Future Forward, Harris’s own Super PAC, the ad shifted the race 2.7 percentage points in Trump’s favor after viewers watched it, per The New York Times.
Echoes of the “they/them” ad were loud in the 2026 midterm race. The aforementioned Ager ad with the deepfaked barn dance ends with a slogan saying “Jamie Ager talks like you and me, but he’s dancing with they/them.”
But though the GOP reheated last election’s nachos, they were no longer as appetizing, no doubt because the United States is in a much different place in 2026 than it was in 2024. It’s hard to blame trans people for the state of the country after watching the killing of queer Minnesotan Renée Nicole Good and nurse Alex Pretti. No trans person opened the door for the cyclospara outbreak, which affected 20,000 Americans and killed two. Trans people didn’t start a war in Iran. They didn’t rocket the price of diesel to $6 a gallon.
Even some members of the Republican party seemed to understand that fatigue with anti-trans messaging was setting in, perhaps foreseeing tonight’s outcome. In October, former Texas House Speaker Dade Phelan told Texas Monthly that the GOP’s “culture wars” hyperfocus was not bearing the electoral fruit it once had.
“We’re just not paying attention to the issues that matter,” he said. “We’re still running transgender ads. It’s just not resonating. $100 million in ads, $125 million in ads, and nothing’s moved the needle here in Texas in a month in the Senate race.”
Exit polls from NBC news suggested that the GOP’s massive push on anti-trans ads was unsuccessful: The percentage of voters who said support for trans right had “gone too far” took a slight 2% downturn compared to 2025 and Democrats held a nine-point advantage (44% to 35%) as to who had better policies related to trans people.
There are, of course, many Democratic politicians who did not take the bait and refused to abandon trans Americans regardless of what consultants and messaging experts told them it might mean at the polls — and tonight, they look wise indeed. In an October 28 interview with journalist Touré on his personal YouTube page, New York congressional hopeful Claire Valdez offered full-throated pro-trans support, even when asked about it potentially being a “losing issue.”
“I don’t think we can allow it to be a losing issue,” she said. “When we start saying some people deserve human rights and some don’t, that’s a really slippery slope.”
She continued, “Everyone deserves gender-affirming care, real health care, pre-natal care, dignified housing. Everyone deserves that. We can’t carve people out.”
When far-right outlet Breitbart tried to use Claire Valdez’s own words against her, she replied with a simple “Yes” on social media. She won handily on Tuesday night.
Even Michigan Democratic Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed, who has been under the microscope as a Muslim politician in a high-profile race, would not back away from his support of trans youth, no matter how often he was pressed.
On Sunday, he told 60 Minutes’ Ross Douthat that the question of trans athletes in sports was a culture wars issue meant to distract from the economy.
“A lot of the cultural war issues that get fought right now are about trying to distract us from the fact that we can’t afford our gas, can’t afford our groceries, can’t see a doctor, are worried about whether or not our kids are going to have a good life,” he said.
El-Sayed, a medical doctor, has also stood firm that gender-affirming care is a decision between a child, a family, and a medical professional.
“They are the experts that a patient wants to see when they seek care,” El-Sayed said at a rally in September. "And the decision about what healthcare is necessary ought to be held between a patient — and or their parents if they're under the age of 18 — and their doctor. That’s it.”
As midnight approached in Michigan on Tuesday night, El-Sayed was in the lead.
It’s true, there were several instances where voters were allowed to vote directly on trans rights: ballot initiatives in Arizona, Washington, Colorado, and Nebraska tasked the electorate with deciding whether trans athletes should be allowed to play in leagues that match their gender identity. Missouri and Colorado are allowing voters to decide policies regarding gender-affirming care. At the time of this writing, the anti-trans positions on some of these ballot initiatives are leading in the vote with margins that are not reflective of Republican performance overall. We may wake up tomorrow to find that some have passed. (This, of course, is one of the dangers of having the entire citizenry vote on minority rights.)
But these individual results, if they do not land in trans people’s favor, are not simply an expression of deep-seated transphobia. These are instances of Republicans twisting the culture war knife in specific pain points of the body politic. But tonight’s result is a reminder that this politic is not long for this world, and that it already has limits in what it can accomplish.
While Obergefell at least quelled the anti-marriage equality fervor for a while, we may be looking at a while yet before the damage of the last few years is undone. Thanks to the barrage of anti-trans legislation, red states largely ban health care for trans youth along with participation in sports. Repeals are a distant dream, and the current composition of the Supreme Court makes friendly decisions unlikely.
However, Tuesday’s blue wave has at least served as a rebuke that shores up El-Sayed’s rock-solid response to the trans rights question. Voters don’t want to litigate and re-litigate trans rights. They know that trans youth are not to blame for their pain at the pump or the grocery store register. They don’t have their finger on a switch that is downturning the economy. And they haven’t made $2 billion while sitting in the White House.
GOP, it’s time to rethink your strategy. Because using trans people to pull the wool over the electorate’s eyes clearly isn’t going to work anymore.
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