Republicans’ virulent transphobia will dominate in the Iowa Caucuses. But election results over the last year indicate that this strategy may lose in the general election.
Next Monday Republicans in Iowa will gather at local caucuses in the very first electoral contest of the 2024 presidential cycle.
The Iowa caucuses have been the starting point for national elections since 1972. Following the local votes, candidates will split the state’s 40 delegates based on the vote totals for each candidate. Those delegates will then vote at the party’s presidential convention, set to be held in Milwaukee, WI in mid-July.
Polls of Iowa caucus-goers have mostly shown former President Donald Trump dominating the field, though more recent polling indicates that the race is tightening. The conventional wisdom has long been that the most interesting part of this primary season is the race for second place between former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley and current Florida governor Ron DeSantis.
That dynamic was on full display Wednesday evening as the two faced off in a CNN debate in their last high profile appeal to potential Iowa caucus-goers. The two traded attacks on a variety of issues, but the issue that continues to dominate the Republican discourse in the primaries and beyond is their vitriol towards transgender people unparalleled in modern political discourse. But general election results over the last year indicate that this issue may not lead to a winning ticket this year, forcing GOP candidates to thread a difficult balance between offering the conservative base enough red meat on trans issues without alienating moderate general election voters.
At one point DeSantis launched into an anti-Disney rant, accusing the company of “transing” kids. “Transing” is a verb made up by Republicans to portray youth coming out as trans and socially transitioning as something done to them by adults in their lives with purported malicious intent. He accused Haley–who holds basically the same policy position on trans issues as he does–as being “soft” on trans issues because she vetoed a bathroom bill in South Carolina in 2016.
For an outsider not familiar with the issue, seeing Ron DeSantis on stage on national television ranting about “transing” will likely think he’s crazy. First because you need several levels of social media brain poisoning just to understand the connection he’s trying to make between trans kids and Disney, and secondly because who really cares about any of it in the first place?
Taking rights away from trans people and their parents doesn’t put food on the table or make a worker’s paycheck go further. Yet this rhetoric is part of a calculated strategy to win over disillusioned suburban voters that dates back to the 2021 Virginia governor’s race.
A calculated strategy
In Trump’s first election in 2016, there wasn’t as much conservative panic about trans people as there is now. Republican candidates for president didn’t have to prove to their rabid base that they were transphobic enough to be worthy of a vote.
Over the time between then and now, trans issues went from a fringe culture war talking point that only appealed to the most religious of conservatives, to one of the most central tenets of modern Republican ideology. The rise of transphobia as a political strategy for the right has been partially due to a calculated effort to appeal to suburban voters, who Trump-era Republicans have struggled to reach.
While anti-trans policies have been pushed since the Obergefell Supreme Court ruling legalizing gay marriage, the rhetoric really started to ramp up after Republican Glenn Youngkin seemingly broke through with educated suburban voters in the the 2021 Virginia governor’s race by heavily focusing on trans issues. Previous to that race, Republicans across the country struggled to connect with suburbanites.
A look at state-level anti-trans laws passed last year shows that this issue now absolutely dominates the conservative agenda. As such, it’s critical for Republican candidates hoping to win a presidential primary to appeal to the party’s vehemently transphobic voting base.
At the same time, anti-trans rhetoric has largely been a losing election issue in many general elections. In last year’s off-year election, vocally anti-trans politicians lost most of their races. The explicitly anti-trans activist group Moms for Liberty lost hundreds of school board elections and lost control of many key larger districts like Loudoun and Bucks Counties. Ohio conservatives tried to turn a statewide referendum about abortion rights into a debate about trans issues and lost handily.
This is not new. In the 2022 midterms, the only major anti-trans candidate to win a race was DeSantis, with most of the rest of the worst transphobes losing their races. During the red wave election of 2016, which saw Trump first elected to the White House, North Carolina governor Pat McCrory narrowly lost his re-election campaign after a national backlash against the state’s bathroom bill, the infamous HB2.
Trans people are less than one percent of the total population of the United States. To the average voter, most of whom do not personally know a trans person, candidates who overtly spread hatred towards trans people often come off as internet-poisoned weirdos.
A cornerstone of the republican strategy to foment violent transphobia in their base is conservative online media. Conservative news consumers are fed a constant diet of transphobic hate and then log onto social media where they can find community with other transphobes, as well as trans people to harass. This has violent, real world effects: Several children’s hospitals have been barraged with bomb threats after major conservative social media accounts made posts pointing out these facilities provide gender-affirming care for trans adolescents.
Conservatives’ unhealthy obsession with portraying trans people as freaks worthy of derision and persecution, has created a hostile environment in which those who regularly consume content from those websites and social media accounts will vote for candidates who have matching rhetoric.
The Iowa Caucus
While Republican’s transphobic rhetoric may tap into some deep seated discomfort with gender non-conformity, most people are not sitting at home thinking about trans people all day.
In the caucus race, DeSantis has leaned hard into transphobia as a core message, playing off of his extreme anti-trans record as governor, but so far he’s failed to connect with voters. Instead it’s Haley, with her seemingly “gentle” transphobia that appears to be winning the day.
I’m expecting Haley to win the race for second place in Iowa in part because she is able to come across as generally moderate while still holding the extreme views of the average GOP voter. Of course, that all runs secondary to Trump, who himself has leaned much harder into anti-trans rhetoric than he did when he was in office, and finds himself with a fairly comfortable polling lead.
As the primary season wears on, keep an eye on whether the leading Republican tries to soften their transphobic messaging. As history tells us, it would be the smart electoral play.
Katelyn Burns a freelance journalist and podcaster. She was the first ever openly trans Capitol Hill reporter in US history and she can be found on Twitter @transscribe.
