In the last few days, James Talarico, the Democratic Senate hopeful in Texas, has appeared to walk back his support of transgender rights. Just a few years ago, Talarico was saying things like “God is nonbinary” and “trans children are God’s children.” Now he is performing some mealy-mouthed middle ground, implying that he regrets his past statements, telling Fox News that he opposes trans athletes in girls’ sports “if it endangers safety and fairness,” and stating that he would support a federal ban on gender-affirming surgeries for minors.

We’ve seen other Democrats take a similar approach. It started with Gavin Newsom, who loudly moved right following Kamala Harris’s 2024 loss and said it was “deeply unfair” for trans athletes to compete in girls and women’s sports. Now the move is fairly popular. Rob Sand, the Democratic nominee for governor in Iowa, made similar statements. Amy Acton, who’s running for governor in Ohio, started her campaign talking about standing up for the LGBT community, but pivoted to saying things like “I do not support boys playing in girls sports,” which seems to reject transgender identity altogether.

The reason this is happening isn’t a mystery. The reality is that trans participation in sports in particular is extremely unpopular. Vast majorities say they are uncomfortable with it – including, in many polls, considerable majorities of Democrats. Depressingly, the result holds even if you reframe the issue: a peer-reviewed paper published this Spring showed that using an egalitarian framing in your poll question (highlighting the idea that trans girls are being discriminated against) only shifts opinions slightly. As a result, Republicans are aggressively pressing the issue, and many journalists are following their lead.

For a lot of political analysts and consultants, this is where the issue begins and ends. Trans rights are polling poorly, and so the effective political strategy is to distance yourself. That’s politics 101, they think – common sense – and anyone who questions it is being naive. If I’m being honest I find this type of calculus mildly repulsive. I don’t think that fundamental rights should be haphazardly sacrificed at the altar of polling. But the argument doesn’t hold up even on its own terms.

It needs to be said that much of the Democratic approach to politics right now is essentially a trauma response to 2024. In this specific case it’s not just a response to the idea that “wokeness” hurt Kamala, but to the Trump campaign’s infamous “Kamala is for they/them – President Trump is for you” ad, which a Democratic PAC found shifted focus groups toward Trump by 2.7 points after viewing. Anecdotes like this led to a wave of consultants and analysts advising Democrats to move away from the issue, perhaps even eschewing words like “cisgender.” The week after the election, Matt Yglesias published his “Common Sense Democrat manifesto,” which said that “race is a social construct, but biological sex is not.”

The initial impression that the excesses of woke politics sank Kamala has lingered among Democrats, but it was never borne out by the data. Subsequent research found that the they/them ad didn’t actually seem to impact votes. On top of that, more data-driven analysis showed minimal impact from trans issues in 2024 generally. David Shor told Ezra Klein that the economy and immigration were the issues that moved voters the most, and that Democrats had overemphasized the impact of cultural issues on the outcome. Greenberg Research, founded by longtime Dem pollster Stanley Greenberg, asked Trump voters to rank their reasons for opposing Kamala, and her position on trans issues ranked just sixth among independents (right above “killing American energy production,” an issue I’ve never heard a pundit bring up once). Gallup’s pre-election polling ranked trans rights as the twenty-second most important issue among voters.

Of course, we don’t need to rely entirely on data analysis – we saw the anti-trans playbook fall flat the very next year. When Abigail Spanberger was relentlessly attacked for her support of trans rights during the Virginia gubernatorial race (often with messaging mimicking Trump’s “they/them” ad), she stood her ground and won handily. Mikie Sherrill, who was attacked for voting against federal bans on trans women in sports, mostly ignored the issue without ceding any ground, and similarly cruised to victory.

So yes, voters are very plainly skeptical of trans rights right now, especially when we’re talking about trans athletes in girls and women’s sports. But the evidence that the issue moves the needle in elections is paper thin.

This is a matter of salience. Most voters aren’t supportive of trans rights, but they don’t feel strongly about them, either. This was true in 2024, when data showed that voters cared far more about economic issues and wanted candidates to discuss trans issues less. It was true in 2025, when pro-trans candidates rolled to victory. It’s true now – the issue didn’t list among voters’ priorities in a Pew survey from this summer or recent polls in Texas. 

All of this leads me to believe that, contra all the hand-wringing, a candidate’s position on trans athletes simply doesn’t matter much electorally. All of the hedging and equivocation and retreat is being done in service of an unproven political calculus. At best, it’s unnecessary. At worst, it alienates your own base. You’re trading away the rights of a minority group within your coalition and getting nothing tangible in return.

This all bothers me for a couple of reasons. First, and most importantly, I’m watching my trans friends have their rights forfeit at the behest of inept consultants and strategists. Second, I’m worried about what it says about the mindset of so many people within the Democratic Party. They claim that they’re being pragmatic, but in reality they’re seeing ghosts. 

It can’t be the policy of the Democrats that every unpopular position is surrendered. If you’re constantly willing to alienate and de-energize a percentage of your base in exchange for an undefined handful of moderate votes, you’ll eventually find yourself with no coherent political constituency at all. The transaction doesn’t live in a vacuum: your base sees it each time, and each time their trust in you wavers a little more.

I’m not going to pretend to be clairvoyant on matters of political strategy. It may be that in Texas, in this one particular race at this one particular moment, backing away from trans rights could help win an election. But I’m worried about a political movement that, in a moment calling for strength and solidarity, acts like retreat is common sense.