This supposed GOP silver bullet doesn't work, and other lessons from Dem election wins

Within hours of the 2024 presidential election, we saw lots of blame being thrown on Democrats’ championing of LGBTQ rights and, in particular, trans rights, as a major reason for Kamala Harris’s loss.

This, even as Harris hardly discussed trans rights. Incessant attention was nonetheless paid to one anti-trans ad that research even showed didn’t actually effectively sway many voters.

Democratic Rep. Seth Moulton of Massachusetts was among the first of the critics, telling the New York Times days after the election, “I have two little girls, I don’t want them getting run over on a playing field by a male or formerly male athlete, but as a Democrat, I’m supposed to be afraid to say that.”

His comments rightly sparked backlash, but he doubled down. We then saw story after story for months throughout 2025 about the Democrats’ supposed “trans problem.”

But now, as he pursues a primary challenge against Sen. Ed Markey (D-MA), Moulton is singing a completely different tune, promising to “support and lead legislation like the Transgender Bill of Rights.” Moulton says he’s, “spoken with many in the trans community. I’ve listened, I’ve learned, and I understand why those words hurt people. I take responsibility for that.”

What happened?

Certainly there’s political opportunism here, as Moulton is taking on a liberal champion of LGBTQ rights. But there’s also the realization in the past few months, as Republicans blitzed the airwaves in election campaigns with anti-trans ads but saw their polling unmoved, that this issue was blown way out of proportion. When a candidate like Harris loses by 1.4 percent in the popular vote, you can try to blame it on anything.

But the election results last week have now proved it. We saw landslide elections in New Jersey and Virginia, where Republican candidate Winsome Earle-Sears basically used opposition to trans rights as her platform, as Republicans believed their own hype and thought it was the ticket to winning after 2024, pouring money into anti-trans ads. But Sears lost by a larger margin — almost 15 points — than any Republican in Virginia since 1961, when a segregationist candidate was on the GOP ticket.Anti-trans attacks didn’t work anywhere, as trans candidates even won re-election and a transgender mayor was elected in Pennsylvania, along with other historic firsts for gay candidates in the state. As we saw in Zorhan Mamdani’s stunning win in the New York mayor’s race — as he championed trans rights and funding for gender-affirming care — affordability and the economy were the issues Americans cared about, just as they were in 2024.

This played out in race after race last week, in state after state, and in local races for city council and town council. People were horrified by Trump’s attack on democracy and his broken promises on the economy. That did in the GOP.

The GOP thought they had magic in a bottle after 2024 and spent millions on anti-LGBTQ ads that didn’t work in 2025.

We expect Republicans to push hate and glom onto desperate lines of attack. But we should not accept it when Democrats impulsively buy it as well, and then cast blame, throwing marginalized groups under the bus.

We saw this from Governor Gavin Newsom of California and Democrats early this year, and from centrist groups like Third Way. Like Moulton, Newsom now seems to have dropped the anti-trans stuff, realizing there’s more electoral gold in hitting Trump hard on his attacks on democracy and his broken promises on the economy.

In countering the misguided claims, I wrote after the election about how the LGBTQ vote grew in 2024 to a substantial 8 percent of the electorate, and voted for Harris by 86 percent, a big increase over Joe Biden. That’s a powerful voting block, and, politically, it’s smart for Democrats to court it rather than jettison it based on impulse. It’s also the right thing to do.

The shutdown cave in, and the future

On Monday on my SiriusXM program, the phones were flooded with callers angry about the Senate Democrats cowardly caving in on the shutdown and not getting the Obamacare subsidies extended. There’s been a lot written about it, and about the eight Democrats who voted with the GOP, two of whom are retiring, and others not up for re-election for years — and how it all looked orchestrated by leadership (Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY)) to protect incumbents up for re-election this year from angering the base. So I will not belabor that.

I want to say that the discussion yesterday on the show was nuanced, with some people seeing the Democrats as having made their point and using the shutdown to their advantage, and some even said they won it. Republicans will now own the rising Obamacare premiums as there either won’t be a promised vote or they will vote it down. Democrats, in their demand, were always giving Republicans something they needed, and many of the vulnerable GOP House members will be done in by this and everything else they’ve voted for with a gun to their heads by Trump and Mike Johnson.

We also saw Democrats listen to the base longer than they have in the past, keeping the shutdown going for long enough to raise awareness about the healthcare issue. It means they are responding to the base. Even if they collapsed, they’re collapsing less quickly, and that’s a good thing. We need to hash this out, certainly talk about new leadership, and then move on to bigger and dangerous fish to fry — Trump and the GOP. The Washington Post has a story about how, on balance, Democrats have actually learned to fight back over the course of this year, listening to the base. Let’s make sure they listen a lot more.

Please go read….

… Mark Joseph Stern’s piece on the Supreme Court, and Kim Davis’s idiotic attempt to overturn marriage equality. It annoyed me that her long-shot challenge got the attention it did. Thousands of people unsuccessfully appeal to the Supreme Court each year. Too much of the media is portraying the court not taking the case as an example of the Supreme Court defending marriage equality. But Davis’ case was never the case they were going to use to overturn Obergefell, and, more so, they are harming LGBTQ rights and gay and lesbian couples in so many other ways, and we can’t lose sight of that.

• Michelangelo Signorile writes The Signorile Report, a free and reader-supported Substack. If you’ve valued reading The Signorile Report, consider becoming a paid subscriber and supporting independent, ad-free opinion journalism.