Vice President Kamala Harris rarely, if ever, brought up transgender rights during her 2024 presidential bid — but President-elect Donald Trump did, devoting nearly 20% of his ad budget to the issue.
That $37 million investment seems to have paid off.
According to a new Yahoo News/YouGov poll, nearly three-quarters of Americans who voted this year (74%) say they heard either “a lot” or “some” about Harris’s “plan” to “protect the rights of transgender people” — far more than say the same about seven other policies that Harris actually campaigned on, such as lowering the cost of living for the middle class (51%) and securing the U.S. border with Mexico (36%).
The survey of 1,612 U.S. adults, which was conducted from Nov. 14 to 18, does not show that Harris lost the 2024 election because of transgender rights. President Biden’s paltry approval rating (36%) and voters’ widespread dissatisfaction with the direction of the country (just 28% said the United States is on the right track) would have made it difficult for any Democrat to hold the White House, let alone one who has spent four years as Biden’s second-in-command.
But the new Yahoo News/YouGov poll does illustrate how hard it was for Harris to break through amid Trump’s onslaught on transgender issues — and how that dynamic might have affected overall impressions of the two candidates.
Trump tied Harris to transgender rights
Trump’s most prominent ads featured 2019 footage of Harris saying that “every transgender inmate in the prison system would have access” to taxpayer-funded gender transitions. “Kamala is for they/them,” an announcer said. “President Trump is for you.”
According to FactCheck.org, Harris once touted her efforts “behind the scenes” to “chang[e] the policy in the state of California so that every transgender inmate in the prison system would have access to the medical care that they desired and need.” She later added in 2019 that she would “support policies ensuring that federal prisoners and detainees are able to obtain medically necessary care for gender transition, including surgical care, while incarcerated or detained.”
But when asked this year to respond to Trump’s ads, Harris’s communications director insisted that “this is not what she is proposing, it’s not what she’s running on.” Harris herself went on to clarify that she would “follow the law” if elected, noting that even “under Donald Trump’s administration, these surgeries were available on a medical necessity basis to people in the federal prison system.”
Otherwise, Harris said little during the campaign about the issue.
To gauge what registered with the electorate and what didn’t, Yahoo News and YouGov asked voters how much they’d heard about 18 polices — nine for Harris and nine for Trump.
Only two of them made a bigger impression than Harris’s “plan” to protect the rights of transgender people, and both were issues (unlike transgender rights) that the candidates themselves focused on: Trump’s plan to “deport millions of immigrants who entered the country illegally” (89% heard a lot or some) and Harris’s plan to “restore abortion rights nationally to where they were under Roe v. Wade” (80% heard a lot or some).
Ultimately, Trump was so effective in tying Harris to transgender rights that more voters said they heard at least something about Harris’s plan to protect such rights (again, 74%) than said the same about any of Trump’s own policies aside from mass deportation, including eliminating federal income taxes on tips for service workers (68%) and ending the war between Russia and Ukraine (66%).
Meanwhile, the issues that Harris tried to turn against Trump the way he turned transgender rights against her did not have the same reach, including his plan to launch criminal investigations into politicians who are critical of him (53% said they had heard a lot or some) and his plan to use the National Guard and possibly the military to “handle” his enemies within the United States (54% heard a lot or some).
Why Trump’s transgender strategy worked
This gap between what Harris wanted voters to hear and what they actually heard probably didn’t help her campaign. The problem is not that transgender rights were top of mind when voters cast their ballots; exit polls clearly showed that issues such as the economy, immigration abortion and democracy were far more important to Americans this year.
But by advertising about prison “sex changes” and mocking transgender female athletes at his rallies, Trump’s aim was to portray Harris, a woman of color, as “out of the mainstream,” the New York Times reported earlier this week.
Even the Harris campaign found that the strategy worked. According to the Times, Harris’s own internal research concluded that Trump’s transgender ads “made voters think that Ms. Harris was focusing on things they did not care about” rather than on the economy.
The new Yahoo News/YouGov poll hints at the kind of indirect impact this might have had on Election Day.
Slightly more voters (57%) said they had heard about Harris’ plan to “lower the cost of living for middle-class Americans,” for instance, than said the same about Trump (54%). Yet only 38% said they thought it was “mostly true” that Harris’s plans “would reduce inflation and lower prices.” For Trump, the corresponding number was much higher (51%).
By the same token, 47% of voters said Trump’s plans “will make life better for people like me,” compared to 38% who said his plans “will make life worse for people like me.”
For Harris, those numbers were reversed: 39% better versus 45% worse. Overall, just 38% of voters thought Harris would have “changed America for the better” — a full 10 points lower than the 48% who now believe that’s what Trump will do in his second term.
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The Yahoo News survey was conducted by YouGov using a nationally representative sample of 1,612 U.S. adults interviewed online from Nov. 14 to 18, 2024. The sample was weighted according to gender, age, race, education, 2024 election turnout and presidential vote, party identification and current voter registration status. Demographic weighting targets come from the 2019 American Community Survey. Party identification is weighted to the estimated distribution at the time of the election (31% Democratic, 32% Republican). Respondents were selected from YouGov’s opt-in panel to be representative of all U.S. adults. The margin of error is approximately 2.6%.
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