In North Carolina’s Senate race, Republicans take an ugly page from their 2024 playbook
If you watched TV at any point during the 2024 presidential election, you might remember the “Kamala is for they/them” ads that seemed to dominate the airwaves.
That fearmongering about transgender issues was one of the ugliest pages of the GOP playbook in 2024. Now, in North Carolina’s upcoming U.S. Senate race, Republicans are picking it back up again.
The Senate Leadership Fund has already launched an ad slamming former Gov. Roy Cooper’s “radical gender ideology,” pointing out that Cooper vetoed a bill restricting transgender athletes from participating in girls’ sports and one banning gender-affirming care for minors. The ad puts a photo of Cooper alongside text that reads “Roy Cooper sides with they/them” with a photo of a drag queen in the background.
That could be a problem for Cooper and for Democrats, because the “Kamala is for they/them” ads were quite effective during the 2024 campaign. The Trump campaign spent millions of dollars on the ads, and they ran more than 30,000 times, particularly in swing states like North Carolina.
Scapegoating and demonizing an already vulnerable population is a heinous way to win elections. Transgender people and their allies are not the enemy, no matter how much Republicans want you to think they are a threat. But that message, abhorrent as it was, seemed to work for Republicans last year, so it’s no surprise they would now try to use it again.
But one of the biggest reasons they were effective in 2024 was because Democrats never had a good response to them. They didn’t take the ads seriously. They stayed silent when they should have spoken up.
“That’s just political malpractice,” Imara Jones, a journalist and founder of TransLash Media, said. “I mean, the number one rule in politics is that you don’t let attacks go unanswered, and they let an attack go unanswered for the most crucial part of the campaign.”
Jones said that the party’s silence signaled to Republicans that they could use the issue of transgender rights to make significant political headway against Democrats.
But with Republicans now reviving that messaging in competitive Senate races, Democrats will get another chance to respond. The wider appeal of the ads isn’t that they tapped into some latent hatred of the transgender community. It’s that they painted Harris as someone who was out of touch with the needs of everyday Americans. They implied that support for transgender rights meant Harris couldn’t or wouldn’t care about the issues that matter to them.
The job for Democrats, then, is to explain to people why that’s not the case, Jones said.
“Generally speaking, people believe in fairness and equal treatment, and I think that Democrats can make arguments about this on those very understandable lines for most people,” Jones said. “But you can’t just sit back and close your eyes and hope that the issue goes away.”
Mac McCorkle, a former Democratic consultant who now teaches at Duke University, also believes there’s an opening for Democrats to regain ground on the issue. While public opinion on gender identity and transgender issues is generally split, polls do show Americans support protecting transgender people from discrimination, and they oppose laws that ban gender-affirming care for minors.
“So much about politics is about who’s overreaching,” McCorkle said. “And so on the medical issue, on the sports issue, the point that the Democrats can make is this should be decisions made by parents and doctors and entities that really understand what’s going on here, not politicians.”
McCorkle, though, isn’t sure that trying to hit Cooper on transgender issues will work as well as it did with Harris in 2024. For one, 2026 will be a different political environment, and Republicans will face greater headwinds on things like the economy that may make culture war issues less potent. But it’s also because Cooper has always been the kind of politician who can market progressive ideas in a way that resonates with voters across the ideological spectrum.
“It’s going to be tough to nail Roy Cooper with all the culture war stuff,” McCorkle said. “It really is. Just the way he explains things, the way he thinks about things, it’s going to be tough.”
This story was originally published August 15, 2025 at 5:00 AM.
