In Republican political ads this election year, there is a scapegoat no matter the topic. The same scapegoats—often trans people, immigrants, or both—are blamed for incredibly divergent issues. The ads paint the scapegoated group as a menace that Democrats have unleashed. And while scapegoating itself is nothing new, what’s striking about this election cycle is how the scapegoats have become more prominent, in many ads, than the issues or even than the candidates.
As Election Day nears, Republican are shifting to negative ads only: spending just over $52 million on negative ads in the first two weeks of October alone, according to AdImpact, around $13.5 million on “neutral” ads, and zero dollars on positive ads. Anti-trans ads have received the most attention in these last few weeks. Trump’s campaign spent $21 million in one two-week period in October on these ads, with campaigns for Republicans running for Senate spending $77 million on anti-trans ads since mid-July. They’re targeting swing states and major sporting events, now including the World Series, introducing a generation of kids to trans people through the hateful ads that came with their baseball.
Some of these ads recycle the same brief clip of Harris in a 2019 candidate forum with the National Center for Transgender Equality, in which she says she worked to ensure an incarcerated trans woman would receive access to surgery. The Trump campaign spent $19 million to run one ad featuring this clip, called “Insane.” The ad shows the woman’s mug shot under a headline reading, “Convicted for First-Degree Murder,” misgendering her throughout. Harris is shown in the 2019 clip, saying they changed the policy so all trans people in prison would have access to care. “Sounds insane, because it is insane,” a voiceover says. “Kamala’s agenda is they/them. Not you,” mocking inclusive pronouns and Harris by extension. The ad’s message is that Harris is putting an undeserving person ahead of other Americans; that transition is selfish and extravagant; that trans people are stealing something from you. Other ads from Republican Senate campaigns associate their opponents with Republicans’ moral panics over Drag Story Hours and trans student athletes being harmful to children. The message here is even more sinister than in the Harris ad: Trans people are stealing your children.
The only people scapegoated more than trans people in Republican ads are immigrants. From July through September, Republicans spent nearly $243 million on anti-immigrant ads, according to Immigration Hub and AdImpact. These ads most frequently mention “crime,” which has been the Republican strategy: to portray all immigrants as criminals.
Some ads combine all these scapegoats. In an ad titled “Lost Their Minds,” one man complains, “Here’s what Kamala Harris thought my money should go to,” listing off “job training for illegal immigrants even after they commit crimes” and “sex changes for illegal immigrants out of my pocket.”
This appeal to “my pocket,” or your money is a consistent theme in these ads. That’s usually overlooked when the ads are interpreted as just more MAGA culture war. The ads use trans people and immigrants to attack a candidate or ballot measure, but they hinge on this idea of undeserving people being a drain on resources, wanting things they shouldn’t have, who are taking from you.
The ad that really pulled all of this scapegoating into focus for me was a new one from a group opposing New York state’s equal rights ballot measure, Proposition 1—primarily pitched as an abortion rights measure. At first, opponents of the measure tried to associate Proposition 1 with the same anti-trans attack line about “boys playing girls’ sports,” seizing on the inclusion of “gender identity” in the measure to claim this would mean, among other things, trans girls being allowed to play school sports with cis girls. The problem with that is that New York state already considers gender identity to be a protected category, and trans girls are playing school sports with cis girls (though they are now banned in Nassau County, thanks to these misleading and transphobic claims). In other states, in 2022 and 2023, anti-abortion groups adopted the same tactic to try to defeat abortion rights ballot measures, and they all lost. The line may especially not play well in New York, given the protections existing laws in the state already afford trans people, but these ads aren’t about the law. They are trying to hitch a ride on a moral panic already in process.
What do they do when one group no longer serves as a scapegoat? The new “No on 1” ad, which debuted last week, swaps out scary trans girls for scary immigrants, with imagery that would be at home in any of these other anti-immigrant ads. “The border is broken,” the ad begins, showing images of mostly Black and brown people. “New York is paying the price.” The ad does not even mention abortion. Prop 1, it goes on, “could give illegals a constitutional right to taxpayer benefits.” It’s a message to appeal to voters who might not even know abortion is on the ballot but who have been soaking in the kinds of anti-immigrant rhetoric of the Trump campaign, of Fox, of the New York Post.
This ad doesn’t make any sense. But then, most of these ads don’t make a ton of sense. The one thing that holds them together is the scapegoating: It’s the inevitable result, when the Republican Party’s messages are a toxic brew of grievance memes, amplified by Elon Musk. Maybe this is the whole appeal of the GOP platform right now: not Trump or Ted Cruz or JD Vance themselves but ads that tell people where to point their outrage, which brings its own pleasure. What we get then is a carousel of scapegoating, with groups being swapped out to sell the same core messages. Yet as the ads get more pointed and more unhinged, it’s hard not to fear that there’s another purpose, as well: not just to provide a rotating cast of people to blame for whatever issue viewers may have on their minds today but also to indicate the people that Trump and the whole MAGA enterprise want supporters to target if they don’t get what they want next week.
