Progressive activists inadvertently gave Trump his best ad against Harris: columnist

New York Magazine's Jonathan Chait is making the case that left-wing activists may have harmed Vice President Kamala Harris' campaign by pushing her and other candidates to take unpopular positions on transgender rights.

One of Donald Trump's favorite campaign ads is currently bombarding sporting events and is claiming that Kamala Harris wants to give away free gender-transition surgery for prisoners and immigration detainees.

Harris's past stance on this issue comes from an ACLU questionnaire from five years ago, which asked Harris if she'd use executive authority to ensure people who rely on the state for medical care have the opportunity to transition if deemed a necessity. Harris answered, "Yes."

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As she explained on Wednesday, she's following the law. As the law currently stands, that's the rule, just as it was during Trump's time in office.

Regardless, NY Mag's Chait said, "I’m sure neither the ACLU nor the Harris staffers who cooperated in this response set out to seed Republican attack ads. Yet a large portion of the work of the progressive nonprofit complex is functionally dedicated to this very outcome."

Chait's argument is that while these might be important issues to progressives, publicly forcing their candidates into an unpopular box is working against them more than it's helping the cause.

"And these kinds of perverse outcomes will continue to occur unless Democrats get wise to the dynamic that continues to produce them," said Chait, who argued that it's ultimately leading progressive issue-based activist groups from "ignoring pragmatism."

Two Democratic strategists who spoke with NBC News recently said that the issue of allowing transgender women to compete in women's sports in high school was doing real damage to Democrats.

"In all the polls, the trans stuff is bleak. It’s a killer ad," the strategists said.

The New YorkTimes claimed that "Democratic testing" in September showed Trump's anti-transgender ad “was rated as one of his campaign’s more effective."

"The point I’m making here is purely political," Chait said. "I have no moral problem with prisons giving properly run transition care to prisoners who wish to change their sex. I’d also agree that Trump is exploiting the issue in a way designed to spread hatred against all transgender people, rather than to question one small program. (It is so small, indeed, that it went on throughout Trump’s presidency without Trump noticing or caring.)"

He closed by asking, "Rather than continue the process that led to Harris being flayed alive, how about simply not doing that any more?"

Read the full column here.