How Trump's Team Made The Perfect Ad

And who can learn most from the most effective spot of the 2024 election cycle

It was certainly the most memorable ad series of the entire election cycle. “Kamala Harris is for They/Them, Trump is for you” perfectly captured public frustration with the identitarian politics of the Democratic Party. In their new book 2024: How Trump Retook the White House and the Democrats Lost America, authors Isaac Arnsdorf, Josh Dawsey, and Tyler Pager explain the history of those ads.

Chris LaCivita, a seasoned campaigner and senior advisor to the Donald Trump campaign, is described in the book as Trump’s closest confidant along with Susan Wiles. Previously, LaCivita was responsible for the ‘Swift Boat Veterans For Truth’ ads against John Kerry in 2004. According to the authors, he was the key figure behind the 2024 ad spot, too. Emphases added:

One of the fruits of the campaign’s deep dive into the RNC’s Harris video library was a clip of her speaking with the National Center for Transgender Equality Action Fund in 2019, highlighting her work on transgender care for inmates in California. Trump’s advisers, especially LaCivita, viewed the clip as a bombshell and were eager to turn it into an attack ad, with the memorable tagline, “Kamala Is for They/Them. President Trump Is for You.” Pat McCarthy, one of the campaign’s ad makers, delivered the spot to LaCivita for review. “Why do you hate the trannies so much?” LaCivita asked jokingly. Trump liked the ad, and he wanted the team to show more of the transgender woman interviewing Harris in 2019. They also added footage of other transgender employees in the Biden-Harris administration.

The ad would never have worked without the video of Harris in her own words; voters would have dismissed it as too far-fetched. It scored well in audience tests, but pollster Tony Fabrizio had qualms. He didn’t want to interrupt the argument their ads were building on the economy. As a compromise, the campaign decided to split a week’s ad buys between an ad about taxes and the trans ad.

The trans ad generated so much attention that LaCivita added airings during sports programs. He noticed the ad was resonating especially well with Black and Latino men. Radio host Charlamagne Tha God discussed the ad on his show. LaCivita hadn’t heard of the host before and refused to call him “Tha God,” but he eagerly used the clip to make a new version of the ad specifically targeting Black men.

“She’s sitting here and she’s being interviewed by a dude dressed as a woman, he’s six foot six, a big guy with a voice like mine,” LaCivita would tell a group of donors and activists, according to an audio recording. “And he goes, ‘Oh Kamala, do you support taxpayers paying for transgender surgeries?’ And she says, ‘Oh, absolutely. Every prisoner should have access to gender-affirming care, as well as every illegal immigrant.’ So Juan, who crosses the border, decides he wants to be Juanita, and we got to pay for it. Yeah, that’s just not gonna work. We knew we were onto something.”

The impact was not limited to men. LaCivita made a third version of the ad that connected Harris’s position to trans athletes, this one targeting suburban women. In the final days of the race, he went further, with an ad saying Harris’s support for transgender equality plus her hawkish foreign policy would lead to drafting women. “President Trump won’t draft your daughter,” a female voice-over said. Since the ad ran digitally, it didn’t cause much media attention, but LaCivita beamed it directly at persuadable women.

Harris’s team agreed that the ad was devastating because it showed her speaking in her own words. Grow Progress, a consulting firm working for the Harris campaign, tested almost every ad against her, and this was among the most devastating they saw. The Harris campaign considered and taped a number of proposed responses, from attempting to explain she had moderated her position since 2019, to pivoting to the economy, to attacking Trump for his administration’s allowing gender-affirming care in prisons. But none of them tested that well.

Even before the trans ad, the Harris campaign had identified the issue as a vulnerability. In debate prep, Harris workshopped an answer in which she would say she was uncomfortable with trans girls playing sports against other girls, she understood parents’ concerns, and she would let school districts decide. But the topic never came up at the debate.

Harris later addressed the issue of transgender care for prisoners in an interview with Fox’s Bret Baier, arguing that the procedures were available in the federal prison system under Trump. “He spent twenty million dollars on those ads trying to create a sense of fear in the voters because he actually has no plan in this election that is about focusing on the needs of the American people,” she said. “Twenty million dollars on that ad, on an issue that, as it relates to the biggest issues that affect the American people, it’s really quite remote.”

One Harris adviser recalled visiting home for a college football weekend in a swing state and seeing the trans ad during every commercial break. The Trump campaign was running entirely negative ads (or ads contrasting Harris with Trump), wearing down her ratings and making her less acceptable to independents and young men. By comparison, the Harris campaign largely ran positive ads about her, and attack ads against Trump that turned out to be largely ineffective. She never directly tackled the attacks against her — a mistake that reminded one adviser of Mike Dukakis’s 1988 campaign, which ended in a landslide defeat.

A few things are notable here: (1) the ads were “devastating” for Harris in that they (2) reduced her favorability with independents and (3) men, especially (4) minority male voters, which is why (5) the Trump campaign targeted them through sports advertising. Then (6) Kamala Harris came up with an answer to a possible debate question about women’s sports.

It was not a great answer, of course, because there are no good ways to defend males in female sports, whether locally, individually, or by league. But it was at least an answer, and she might have been eager to give that answer.

However, (7) the rules of ‘no debate’ around transgender policy demands applied even to a presidential debate. There were no questions on this ‘culture war’ issue, since it is so marginal that no one even cares about it, according to Democrats, who have no idea how they look, and the corporate media, captured as they are by the ideology of genderwoo.

Democrats have not changed anything about their party brand since November. They still don’t understand how this issue hurts them because they pay too much attention to issue rankings. If only 4 percent of survey respondents say that their top issue is women’s sports, for example, then Democrats assume the issue does not hurt them, that they can win by talking about ‘real’, kitchen table issues as opposed to silly women and girls wanting fair, safe sports for themselves.

Democrats do not see themselves the way others see them, as condescending elitists. They do not understand the immense damage their credibility takes from pandering to the luxury belief that objective, binary human sexes don’t exist, or that the difference does not, or else should not, matter to a moral person.

When voters see Democrats lie about something so basic — and worse, require their children to participate in the lie — it is electoral poison, for the voter assumes that everything else Democrats say is also a dangerous, delusional lie being foisted on their families. Post-covid, asking the public to simply ‘trust me’, especially wherever ‘the science’ is involved, is a non-starter. Voters trust their guts, not talking points.

This puts Democrats in a rhetorical dilemma. In Virginia, Abigail Spanberger is feeling the heat on men in female locker rooms right now. Republican Winsome Earle-Sears surged in the polls and adopted an unambiguous stance. Spanberger tried to answer this challenge with an ad in which she does not directly address the issue, instead glossing it over, while taking the attack personally.

The fake affront fools no one. Like Harris, Spanberger will likely find her response add ineffective on anyone except her base voters. But the fact that she did respond tells us that her internal polling team, like Harris’s, was worried about a decline in her approval rating. The attacks must have hurt her, or else she would say nothing at all.

Spanberger says that she trusts parents and local communities. In Loudoun County, the issue is that parents in the local community distrust a school system that punishes children for recognizing the opposite sex. Spanberger fails to acknowledge here that parents with concerns about genderwoo activists running their public schools currently see Democrats as the “politics” and “politicians” who injected their ideology into public education policy in the first place, creating the entire problem.

Spanberger cannot even talk about the issue because there is no good way for her to stake out a position that satisfies anyone. She would either have to defend the madness of letting grown men into girls’ locker rooms, and admit this is a very weird Democratic Party priority, or else deny that trans women are literal women three times before the cock crows, invoking the wrath of the LGBTQAlphabetical mafia during the weeks prior to Election Day. Either way, she loses, so Spanberger chooses not to choose. It looks weak, and voters loathe weakness.

When I walked out of the Democratic Party over this issue in 2018, and began to speak out, I made some predictions about the next decade. For example, I have been saying that this issue would make Democrats both defensive and incoherent at the same time; now, here we are.

In blue Virginia, Spanberger might win anyway, but she was supposed to run much father ahead of her opponent than she is right now. She was not expecting Earle-Sears to close the gap. Spanberger did not think she would have to address this issue at all, for she thought she was on the right side of history.

I am not a consultant on the Winsome Earle-Sears campaign, but if I was, I would recommend they get in touch with Pat McCarthy, and start cutting “they/them” attack ads for digital and sports TV across Virginia, nonstop, until Election Day. Let the Democrats scream at the unfairness and inhumanity: that is the earned media of a proven, successful attack line. Politics is a bloodsport and Democrats are good at this form of self-harm. Lean in.