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Ashley Hinson claims Iowa kids are having their sex reassigned at school without parental consent. In Texas, Elon Musk spends tens of millions of dollars on anti-trans ads to boost Ken Paxton’s imperiled campaign, while Greg Abbott accuses his Catholic Latina opponent of wanting to impose Sharia law.
There are two explanations for why Republicans, desperate to save their electoral hides, are peddling an endless buffet of culture war slop at the eleventh hour of the 2026 campaign season.
The first is that Donald Trump and fellow Republicans are culture-warring because they misread the 2024 election and believe these issues, and not inflation and economic angst, catapulted them to victory two years ago. The second is that the GOP knows exactly what happened in 2024, but their candidates have little choice but to launch cultural attacks because the same economic conditions that provided tailwinds two years ago are headwinds now.
Either way, these late-campaign antics confirm the GOP’s widespread panic about the pending midterms. But the 2026 results may also signal the declining utility of cultural war politics to distract voters from the fact Trump is the latest Republican to horribly mismanage the national economy.
Learning the wrong lessons
The Republicans’ key economic message in 2024 was simple and effective: Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, and the Democrats caused high prices and crippling inflation. But the GOP paired that economic critique with incessant depictions of Harris and other Democrats as a pack of trans-loving, “woke” sickos who want boys playing girls sports.
Never mind that a new academic study found that people who claim they oppose transgender sports participation to protect women and girls tend to harbor hostile views toward women. These misogynists only care about the trans issue insofar as they can exploit it for political gain, or to generate clicks, eyeballs, and subscribers.
Transphobic fear-mongering may have swung a few marginal races to the GOP in 2024. But the reason Trump won and carried fellow Republicans with him to victory two years ago was voter angst about inflation and the cost of living. The uniformity of the vote shift toward Trump between 2020 and 2024 — both within and across states — cannot possibly be explained by the trans issue, which would cut differently in different parts of America.
Indeed, if the huge sums Musk spent in swing states to run that infamous anti-trans ad were so impactful, the 2024 vote shifts toward Trump would have been greater in the seven swing states than elsewhere. But relative to 2020, Harris actually lost less ground in the swing states than the other 43 states. Though not by much, it is fair to say Harris’s overall messaging was better than Trump’s — that she won the campaign yet lost the election because the economic fundamentals were so heavily tilted against her.
Republicans can convince themselves that transgender politics were crucial to their 2024 victories. And, yes, Pew Research reports that between 2022 and 2025 voters moved closer to conservative positions on trans rights and restrictions.
But issue trust and saliency also matter. And 2026 could turn out to be an inflection point because, on both counts, the transgender policy debate is breaking against the GOP.
According to the October Reuters/Ipsos poll released last week, Democrats now enjoy a 9-point advantage, 38 percent to 29 percent, over Republicans on which party Americans trust more on trans issues. And results from a Pew survey two weeks ago found that “policies related to gay, lesbian, and transgender people” rank sixteenth most important to voters this cycle, with just 23 percent of Americans citing these issues as an important to them.
That figure edges up to 35 percent among self-identified Republicans, but these are base mobilization targets, not undecided voter persuasion targets. For most Americans, transgender policy is not a top-of-their-agenda issue and they trust Republicans less than Democrats to do the right thing.
Musk can spend all he wants on scary ads to help Paxton in Texas. Let Hinson peddle Iowans made-up stories about kids having gender-affirming surgeries between gym class and lunch.
These desperate efforts to win by demeaning the transgender community are unlikely to move the electoral needle this year.
Scary brown people with funny names
Where transphobia lacks punch, Republicans are happy to turn to an old standard: Islamophobia.
Michigan’s US Senate contest featuring Democratic nominee Abdul El-Sayed is the most obvious place for Republicans to incite anti-Muslim fears. With zero evidence, Republican nominee Mike Rogers insinuated that AES is a terrorist sympathizer. JD Vance piled on with his own racist attack on El-Sayed, accusing him of “explicitly anti-white racial hatred.”
Never to be outdone, Trump called AES a terrorist-siding “jihadist” who, if elected, would “be the only senator that will have to go through a metal detector before he’s allowed to go into the Senate.”
Consider how hypocritically racist Trump’s crack is: Per language in the federal code, Trump on January 6 organized a domestic terrorist attack on that same Senate chamber mere moments after asking the Secret Service to stop magnometer weapon screenings of his assembled supporters on the National Mall because those who might be armed were “not there to hurt me.”
Islamophobia also reared its head last weekend in the Texas governor’s race when incumbent Gov. Greg Abbott accused his opponent, state legislator Gina Hinojosa, of supporting Sharia law.
Again, consider how bizarre it is to declare Hinojosa, a Catholic, a Muslim sympathizer. Abbott’s attack only makes sense if he thinks white Texans are so hateful, xenophobic, and/or stupid that they believe any person of color shares such a strong, linked-fate connection with Muslims they would willingly subvert the Constitution in order to impose religious rule by another faith’s belief system.
For the record, the United States has more than 90,000 town, municipal, county, and state governments. There’s no need to remove one’s socks and shoes to count how many are ruled by Sharia law because the total is easy to tabulate: Just add the number zero to itself 90,000 times.
Republicans who depict Muslims as religious fanatics bent on undermining secular governance are total hypocrites. The GOP, after all, is the puppet party for white Christian nationalists who incessantly agitate for everything from public displays of the Ten Commandments to inserting Bible verses in school textbooks.
Choose any book penned by scholars of Christian nationalism: Tim Alberta, Robert Jones, Samuel Perry, Katherine Stewart, or Andrew Whitehead, to name a few. All of them explain that Christian nationalists want to subsume secular law to biblical injunctions. These religious radicals not only reject the separation of church from state, but advocate for the unconstitutional elevation of church over state. Well, so long as that church is their own.
Preying on anti-Muslim fears is racial and religious bigotry, simple as that.
Claptrapped
It doesn’t take a genius pundit or overpaid consultant to recognize what’s happening in the waning moments of Campaign 2026.
Donald Trump and his fellow Republicans are pushing transphobia and Islamophobia because Trump ruined the economy and Republicans have zero policy achievements the past two years to tout. So they chose instead to demonize anyone who deviates from how white, male, Christians look, act, think, or pray, even if the demons must be invented.
Republicans face a 7-point partisan disadvantage in voter enthusiasm and a generic ballot disadvantage that last week reached 12 points in one survey. The party realizes the same economic tailwinds that propelled its candidates last cycle are frighteningly similar to the headwinds the GOP confronts this cycle. Regular gas and diesel prices have soared and inflation is higher today under Trump than it was when Biden left office nearly 22 months ago.
Republican candidates are selling culture war claptrap because they have nothing else. Let Republicans dissemble and demonize. Perhaps their effort to distract voters from the horrible economy by deploying cultural attacks will spare a few endangered Republicans in close races.
But this late in the campaign season, a desperate GOP’s rancid cultural politics are too little, too late.
That’s it for today
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Thanks for reading.
Your explanation is as good as any. I have a hard time understanding the culture wars. They seem so obvious and stupid. More baffling to me is the rise of vulgar language and insults by elected officials. We know trump does it because his filters are failing, but the others, like the VP, don't have that excuse. There's no trans issue. It's all manufactured hysteria over a small marginalized part of the population.
“Never mind that a new academic study found that people who claim they oppose transgender sports participation to protect women and girls tend to harbor hostile views toward women.” Of course, because people who claim they oppose “boys in girls’ sports” view women as weak children who must be protected since they cannot make their own decisions or possess their own thoughts. Living in the Deep South most of my life, I’ve experienced this mentality way too often.