Some folks on Bluesky are angry because both James Talarico and Gina Hinojosa seem to be hedging a bit on their positions on trans rights. Here’s Talarico:
DALLAS — Democratic U.S. Senate nominee James Talarico on Wednesday said he opposed transgender student-athletes competing in girls’ sports “if it endangers safety or fairness,” reversing course on previous positions he took while in the Texas House opposing restrictions on trans athletes.
Talarico had voted against bills banning trans athletes in high school sports, and he recently characterized attacks on him that were based on his support of trans rights as distractions. However, he had also voted for amendments to what he characterized as “overly broad” bills that would have allowed high school sports governing bodies some discretion on letting trans girls play with cis girls.
Gina Hinojosa released an ad saying that her pronouns are “mom, Texan and soon-to-be Governor”. Her opponent, Texas Governor Greg Abbott, just dropped ads calling her “gender-bending Gina”. If Hinojosa said something else, I haven’t been able to find it.
I understand why trans folks are mad about what Talarico and Hinojosa said. I don’t think Talarico’s argument is a horrible betrayal of trans rights — he’s right that this issue should be a safety one and adjudicated by high school sports governing bodies. But, part of why people are mad about it is that he said it on Fox, and that it sounds like a reversal. Hinojosa being cavalier about “my pronouns are” — which is something important to trans folks — is an insult to them.
The real danger here is the appearance of weakness and demotivation that comes from Democrats appearing to cave in the face of an onslaught of anti-trans ads. I don’t think that ever-so-slight tweaking of messaging on trans rights does much of anything to convince voters who think this issue is important enough to base their vote on. If someone is that worked up over the possibility that a trans girl might play a high school sport, I don’t see Talarico’s statement changing their mind. If you think Hinojosa is a “gender bender” and you think that’s a bad thing, then why the hell would her making fun of pronoun talk change your mind about her candidacy?
Any of you who’ve knocked on a door and encountered a single-issue voter will probably agree with me that there’s no point in trying to change their mind. Abortion is a good example — all the “safe, legal and rare” rhetoric in the world wasn’t going to get anti-abortion nutjobs to vote for a Democrat. It was a waste of time, energy and money.
I don’t know much about Hinojosa, but Talarico is clearly a pretty gifted politician. I wonder if they’re falling victim to advisors who believe the fallacy that voters vote on issues. Some voters do, but most of them vote for the overall candidate. And I think in 2026, the reason that a swing voter will vote for a given Democrat is if they appear strong enough to do the job of reining in MAGA in general and Trump in particular.
I’m well aware that I could be wrong about this, and I’m exquisitely aware that Texas politics are strange, and that both Hinojosa and Talarico have better instincts about Texas politics than I do. That said, it’s clear that, in general, Democrats haven’t figured out how to deal with the onslaught of anti-trans ads that seem to be the main artillery that Republicans pull out in the last two months of the election.
Finally, I don’t even know if those ads are effective. As I mentioned in a previous post, political scientist Adam Bonica mentioned that studies show that TV ads don’t do much to sway opinions. I dug up the study on that:
Every four years, U.S. presidential campaigns collectively spend billions of dollars flooding TV screens across the country with political ads. But a new study co-authored by Yale political scientist Alexander Coppock shows that, regardless of content, context, or audience, those pricey commercials do little to persuade voters.
The study, published Sept. 2 in the journal Science Advances, measured the persuasive effects of 49 high-profile advertisements from the 2016 presidential campaign on a nationally representative sample of 34,000 people through a series of 59 randomized experiments. Expanding on prior research suggesting that political ads have little impact on voters’ preferences, the study shows that those weak effects are consistent irrespective of a number of factors, including an ad’s tone, timing, and its audience’s partisanship.
That study was published in 2020, and was based on the 2016 election. Maybe the ads are just noise. In that case, anything that demotivates the base is a real problem.
