In late September, during the final tense weeks of the Kentucky governor’s race, a few hundred thousand voters started seeing ads in their Facebook feeds, YouTube channels and text messages. One spot showed a teenage boy dominating a high school girls wrestling competition. The other showed a boy easily winning a girls track race. Both ads posed the same question: Is this fair?
The ads were the brainchild of Terry Schilling, a conservative activist, who runs a think tank called the American Principles Project and thinks ads like these are precisely what Republicans need to win this fall’s elections. Schilling, 34, who works out of an office in the Washington suburbs, has a simple and slightly contrarian philosophy that social issues—not economics—win elections. In the fall, Schilling had watched from a distance as Matt Bevin, a Trump ally seeking to become Kentucky’s first two-term Republican governor, struggled to pull ahead of Democrat Andy Beshear despite flogging economic development records as part of his closing pitch to voters. Beltway Republicans were beginning to brace for a defeat that would not only cost the party a precious governorship, but potentially further weaken the president’s shaky hold on suburban voters.
That’s when Schilling and his think tank colleagues put the final touches on a risky plan to introduce an issue that, up until that moment, had not come up in the Kentucky campaign.
When Schilling considered the range of issues making centrist voters and suburban parents uncomfortable, the one that stood out to him was transgender rights: an issue that had largely been absorbed into the Democratic platform, but which he suspected many Americans were still processing themselves. . . . . “What we found was the sports issue got the most powerful response from people, specifically conservative Democrats and independents,” Schilling would explain to me later.
In the end, Bevin still lost. But while many Republicans saw the defeat as a worrisome forecast, Schilling looked at the race and saw a vindication for his theory of the case. A postmortem on the Kentucky election commissioned by APP estimated the group’s messaging campaign, which had cost a relatively modest six-figure investment “delivered nearly 13,000 new votes for Bevin” and brought his margin of defeat down from 31,000 to just over 5,000.
To prove that thesis, Schilling is about to test his message on the biggest electoral stage of all—the 2020 presidential race.
Next week, APP will debut two ads in battleground Michigan that accuse former Vice President Joe Biden, who has generally used his platform to promote protections for LGBTQ youth, of endorsing “gender change treatments for minors,” including surgery and hormone therapies for transgender youth.
In a campaign that has already become defined by the president’s controversial defense of Confederate monuments and attacks on anti-racism protesters, Schilling is hoping that stoking anxieties of suburban women and independents about gender nonconforming adolescents will persuade President Donald Trump to add one more front to his culture war reelection strategy. . . . “What I’m hoping is that once we release these ads and numbers start to move, the Trump campaign will see it’s a powerful issue that the Republican Party can use to its success.”
But there is an enormous gulf inside Trump’s circle of campaign advisers and closest allies over whether, even at this fraught juncture, injecting transgender issues into the campaign is a potential key to victory or an act of self-destruction.
A cohort of establishment Republicans, social libertarians and new GOP converts oppose the strategy. Among them are Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner and his wife, Ivanka. They point to a raft of evidence—from the volatile bathroom debate in North Carolina that lost the GOP the governor’s race in 2016 to a bitter Republican primary in Pennsylvania’s 2018 gubernatorial race—that pushing anti-LGBTQ issues is slowly destroying the Republican Party, one high-profile race at a time. . . . it’s just an easy issue for the other side to attack us on. They will call us bigots,” said one senior adviser to Trump’s reelection campaign.
But Schilling has a formidable roster of like-minded allies at the highest levels of the Trump administration. Top White House policy adviser Stephen Miller was one of the chief architects of the administration’s transgender military ban in July 2017 and has routinely encouraged Trump to engage in the most polarizing cultural battles in order to rouse his base. And in his previous perch as chairman of the ultraconservative House Freedom Caucus, Trump’s chief of staff Mark Meadows threatened to vote against a spending bill if it omitted the transgender provision, which would have prohibited the Pentagon from subsidizing medical costs associated with gender transitions for military personnel.
The chief executive at CWA [Concerned Women for America], Penny Nance, serves on the president’s “Women for Trump” advisory board and said she has personally encouraged Republican leaders to learn about what she calls the dangerous implications of trans-inclusive sports policies “so they feel comfortable speaking” about the issue themselves. Nance has not had the chance to brief Trump on the issue but said it’s a “clarifying cultural event” she hopes he will lean into.
The ads will almost certainly provoke denunciations from the Biden camp, marking a new skirmish in a raging culture war. But can they win?
For some conservatives, the idea of using transgender athletes to win an election looks like a final suicide mission in a war that has already been lost.
For years, it seemed like gay marriage would be a winning issue for the right—Republicans at the state level passed a raft of gay marriage bans in the presidential cycle of 2004—and then, just as suddenly, it wasn’t. The 2015 Supreme Court decision to legalize same-sex marriage in Obergefell v. Hodges capped a seismic shift in public opinion on the issue—effectively ending a messaging battle religious conservatives had spent years waging.
“I don’t think it’s going to work,” Jennifer Williams said of Schilling’s plan to use trans issues as a cudgel against Biden. “Four years ago, they were trying to scare everyone by saying young children and women were going to be assaulted in restrooms. That never happened.”
Williams, 52, is a conservative New Jersey Catholic who, at least on paper, could fit right into the circles Schilling runs in. She’s a married Republican, devoted parent, child of a World War II veteran, member of the National Rifle Association and longtime attendee of the Conservative Political Action Conference, a hot spot for grassroots activism and the party’s rising stars. Williams is also transgender. . . . . “For every voter these scare tactics might get, there will be another voter asking why the president and his allies are focused on transgender children when people are worried about their jobs and whether they can feed their kids and pay their mortgages.”
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