Republicans bet everything on anti-trans messaging. It didn’t pay off

This story was originally reported by Brooke Migdon and Orion Rummler of The 19th. Meet Brooke and Orion and read more of their reporting on gender, politics and policy.Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, a Republican who has passed some of the most extreme anti-LGBTQ+ laws in the country, and Democratic Rep. Sarah McBride of Delaware, the first transgender member of Congress, don’t have much in common. But they do have a similar assessment of what drove Republicans’ historic losses in last week’s midterms. “Anti-trans politics was a flop this election,” McBride said on a Monday press call with the Human Rights Campaign, the country’s largest LGBTQ+ advocacy group. “The American people are tired of a politics of cruelty that does nothing to lower costs or address corruption,” she said.Only days before, while speaking at the Florida state Capitol, DeSantis also pinned the GOP defeat to the party’s fixation on trans people.“I knew Republicans were in trouble when I was reading an overview about, ‘What were they running ads on?’ And they’re spending hundreds of millions of dollars across the country on transgender ads,” he said. “But that was not the issue motivating voters, and it was kind of like an attempt to just scare Republicans to vote.”It was a remarkable analysis for a candidate who in his ultimately failed 2024 presidential campaign highlighted a video attacking President Donald Trump for his past support of LGBTQ+ people — while touting his own reputation as a governor who enacted laws that made Florida one of the most hostile places for trans people to live in the country.Their assessments align with what political analysts on both sides and LGBTQ+ advocates have been saying since election night: Voters were simply not moved by Republicans’ singular focus on attacking trans people, even as they approved a number of ballot measures restricting trans athletes and gender-affirming care. Republicans went all in on the messaging, pouri