In Ohio, a longtime Democratic congresswoman in a tough race, Marcy Kaptur, is running an ad in which she says she thinks “boys should not play in girls’ sports” and that she is focused on “making your life more affordable.”
In North Carolina, a vulnerable Democratic congressman, Don Davis, has released a commercial that shows him stalking a football field and saying that there are “real concerns about fairness and safety” in youth sports and that there “should always be a safe and fair space for women and girls in sports.”
And in several of the country’s most competitive congressional battlegrounds, a leading progressive super PAC is running ads describing Republicans as “obsessed” with transgender people and distracted from rising prices.
As the midterm election approaches, some Democrats in battleground races are moving to respond to Republican attacks casting them as extreme on transgender issues. In some cases, Democrats have reacted by accusing Republicans of being out of touch with voters’ economic concerns, or desperate to change the subject. In others, Democrats have voiced their opposition to transgender female athletes participating in girls’ and women’s sports. At times, their opposition has drawn criticism from other Democrats.
The strategies show how the party has shifted on the issue since the last nationwide election — a pivot that has played out in various ways since early 2025, when Gov. Gavin Newsom, a Democrat from deep-blue California considering a run for president, suggested that the participation of transgender athletes in women’s sports was “deeply unfair.”
Democrats remain divided on the issue. Many of the party’s candidates are wary of either angering the base by taking a position that would limit transgender rights, or taking a position at odds with most voters, who polls show overwhelmingly agree with Republicans on the issue of transgender athletes’ participation in women’s sports.
But a number of Democrats are trying to actively parry Republican attacks, which haunted them in 2024, when Kamala Harris largely elected not to address a torrent of ads from Donald J. Trump that declared: “Kamala is for they/them. President Trump is for you.” Democratic strategists judged the ads to have been highly effective.
In the midterms, Republicans have again put the issue at the center of their message, part of a broader effort to cast Democrats as outside the mainstream. One ad, targeting Mr. Davis, said that the congressman was “fighting for they/them, not us.”
This time, Democrats are not letting the attacks go unanswered.
“For the first time ever, Democrats are strongly on offense on this,” said Christina Freundlich, a Democratic strategist. She added that, while approaches varied across the country, Democrats were broadly focusing on “clarifying the record — but then moving onto groceries.”
Republicans are still directing far more attention and resources to the issue. AdImpact, a media tracking firm, said on Friday that it had observed more than eight times as much Republican spending as Democratic spending on midterm ads focused on L.G.B.T.Q. and transgender issues. Mr. Trump, in a video about the midterms released on Saturday, said that “We’re not going back to transgender for everybody.”
But Republicans have been unable to move the topic to the center of voters’ attention. A CNN poll last month found that “policies regarding gender identity and trans people” did not make the top 10 issues that were most important to voters. (The issue ranked last out of 11 that CNN tested.) A Supreme Court decision in July upholding restrictions on transgender female athletes prompted a flurry of celebratory statements from Republicans, but scant expressions of disappointment from leading Democrats, depriving the G.O.P. of a chance to highlight a contrast.
“Democrats have figured out how to navigate this,” said C. Stewart Verdery Jr., a Republican consultant, though he added that the issue had not fully lost its salience, pointing to polling showing that roughly 80 percent of Americans opposed allowing transgender athletes to participate in women’s sports.
At a moment when Democrats have advantages on many of the other core issues animating the midterms, Republicans have seized on the topic as a way to put Democrats on the defensive. They have framed the issue as one of basic fairness, and say that Democrats want to ignore it.
In some of the country’s most high-profile races, Democrats have sought to take center-ground positions. When Representative Ashley Hinson, the Republican Senate nominee in Iowa, said on the day of the primary that her Democratic opponent, Josh Turek, was “extreme on gender ideology,” his campaign rushed to release a statement saying that he did not believe that “males should be playing female sports.”
In Texas, the Democratic Senate nominee, James Talarico, who has faced a drumbeat of Republican attacks over his past support for allowing transgender athletes in girls’ sports, told Fox News in September: “I oppose trans athletes playing in girls’ sports if it endangers safety or fairness.”
The pivot has been sharpest among Democrats trying to compete in historically Republican territory — like Iowa, Texas or Mr. Davis’s district, a freshly gerrymandered swath of North Carolina that Mr. Trump won by nearly 12 percentage points in 2024.
In Ohio, Ms. Kaptur, a 22nd-term Toledo Democrat, faced local Democratic backlash over the ad in which she says that “boys should not play in girls’ sports.”
“We wanted her to take it down,” said Schuyler Beckwith, the chair of the Democratic Party in Lucas County, which includes Toledo.
Ms. Beckwith said that Ms. Kaptur was “stooping to the level” of Republicans’ “disturbing” rhetoric on the issue. Still, she added that Ms. Kaptur was in a “really tough race” and that she remained focused on helping the congresswoman’s re-election effort.
(On Saturday night, the Republican challenging Ms. Kaptur, Derek Merrin, assailed Ms. Kaptur over the issue at a rally with Mr. Trump, saying she was running from her record. A spokeswoman for Ms. Kaptur, Kylie Blitzer, said in a statement that Mr. Merrin was “desperate to change the subject” and that politicians should not set the rules for girls’ sports.)
In bluer areas, Democratic voters have seemed less forgiving. Representative Seth Moulton, a Democrat who said after the 2024 election that he did not want his daughters “getting run over on a playing field by a male or formerly male athlete,” lost last month by 30 points in a primary against Senator Edward J. Markey. The senator focused heavily on the issue, accusing his challenger of throwing transgender children “under the bus.”
The Transgender Freedom Alliance, a research group advising Democratic candidates, has both urged candidates to respond to the attacks and frowned on the idea of Democrats fully embracing Republicans’ positions on the issue. The group says its research has found that the most effective Democratic answer is to argue that Republicans are fixating on transgender issues at the expense of economic ones.
Adrienne Kimmell, who is leading the group’s research, said Democrats did not need to say that “boys should not play in girls’ sports.”
“It’s just not necessary,” Ms. Kimmell said.
She said she favored the approach of former Senator Sherrod Brown of Ohio, a Democrat running to return to the chamber, who has run an ad featuring a voter who asks, “With everything going on, that’s what they’re talking about?” Another speaker in the ad points to existing restrictions in Ohio on minors seeking gender transitions, and a third blames Mr. Brown’s opponent for rising grocery prices.
Kelley Robinson, the president of the Human Rights Campaign, a prominent L.G.B.T.Q. advocacy group, praised Mr. Brown’s ad. But in a Substack post last month, she expressed concern about the way many Democrats were handling the issue.
“Turning on a vulnerable community is not a winning political strategy,” Ms. Robinson wrote. Addressing Democrats, she added: “It legitimizes their side and weakens ours. And it harms transgender people.”
Representative Vicente Gonzalez, a Texas Democrat who has joined Republicans in voting to criminalize providing gender transition treatments to minors, said it would be “really foolish” for Democrats running in tough races to stake out progressive positions on the issue.
He ran an ad in 2024 in his swing district highlighting his position on gender transition procedures.
“I was the only one who addressed it head-on last cycle,” Mr. Gonzalez said. “I know some folks were critical of it. But the fact is it played well in my district.”
Evan Gorelick contributed reporting.
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