Cultural Politics Take a Nasty Turn
The 2024 Re-elect Trump assault on transgender rights: as a campaign strategy, it’s brilliantly vicious; as an assault on our freedoms, it places voters who identify as moderates in a double bind; as a campaign directive, it’s a dusted off remix of ‘othering’ your opponent.
The Wiles-LaCivita campaign team are redeploying a 2022 election strategy of demonizing LGBTQ+ communities. The form this strategy takes has been reported in the New York Times as an avalanche of media ad buys targeting swing state voters. (1)
Triangulating ‘moderates’ in swing states (2) is the agenda behind the current Republican ad buys. What’s different this election turn is a cultural issue has become weaponized as an assault on families, and on taxpayer dollars going to support a handful of minorities with “gender identity challenges.” The subtext is a portrayal of Democrats playing with your freedom and your pocketbook for political advantage with a self-identifying marginal group.
“It’s one of the issues where Democrats are furthest from the center of the country,” said Brad Todd, a Republican ad maker who has produced commercials on transgender issues in multiple races this year. “They are doing something that is totally illogical to appease a tiny slice that is very radical in their base.”
