Wisconsin voters will elect a new state Supreme Court justice Tuesday, April 1. Some of the top issues in the race are criminal justice, abortion and redistricting. But there’s another topic that crept into ads a week or so before the race — against the liberal-backed candidate — that use messaging some call “parental rights” and others call “anti-trans.”
The campaign of conservative-backed candidate Brad Schimel dropped an ad on March 21 featuring a woman saying that she’s “not OK” with what she calls Crawford’s donors’ “radical agenda.”
“Let transitioning male teachers use my girls' bathrooms at school? Allow boys to compete against them in sports? Giving puberty-blocking drugs to children without parents' consent?,” the woman states. “That's who Susan Crawford sides with, and I'm not OK with any of it.”
It was the first ad about transgender issues this election cycle. Also in recent weeks, an unregistered pro-Schimel political group started sending out text messages asking if parents have a right to know their child is transitioning genders at school.
In response, Crawford’s campaign released an ad accusing Schimel of lying, and saying that the truth is that Crawford is a “former prosecutor, a common sense judge and a mom” who’s always protected kids.
The Crawford campaign said in a statement that Schimel’s campaign is “trying to deflect from his corrupt record of letting child predators and domestic abusers walk with little to no jail time” and said that Crawford “will look at the facts in every case and be a fair and impartial justice.”
Now, the Schimel campaign seems to have stopped that line of ads, and is, instead, heavily messaging Schimel’s recent endorsement by President Donald Trump.
Transgender rights aren’t currently before the state Supreme Court.
Are ads about transgender issues effective?
In the 2024 election, conservative politicians around the country tried to mobilize voters with a slew of anti-trans attack ads. “I mean, you could not turn on the TV without seeing one,” says Abigail Swetz, executive director of Fair Wisconsin, an LGBTQ advocacy organization. “And they were disgusting and they were ugly. And what I think is the most important thing to know about them is that polling shows they did not work.”
Swetz says some of the people who ran anti-trans attack ads did win, but she points to polling from Change Research, a polling firm in San Francisco, that shows that when asked why they made their choice to vote, those anti-trans attack ads did not drive voters.
“And so the reason I think that's so important is that polling shows a majority of the surveyed voters, including a majority of Republicans, saw those ads as mean-spirited,” says Swetz.
But JR Ross, an editor with WisPolitics.com, says the approach may resonate with a segment of potential voters.
“I've asked people this question often over the past year, trying to get a better handle on [the role of trans rights in politics],” he says. “And it feels like from my conversations that it is a motivator for the conservative base. It really lights concerns on fire in terms of, like, ‘I don't like that kind of stuff.’”
Ross says both campaigns, Schimel’s and Crawford’s, need to focus on turning out their bases in an election like this: a statewide race in an off-year without a presidential race or midterms.
He says Schimel’s success could hinge on low-propensity Trump voters. These are people who don’t turn out in elections often. Ross says of the Schimel campaign and his supporters’ efforts to mobilize these voters: “You know, they're making an effort, but we have not seen evidence yet that the Trump voter will turn out when Trump's not on the ballot. That’s a challenge for Schimel.”
Alec Zimmerman, a Wisconsin conservative strategist, says the issue appeals to “the parents rights folks, traditional value voters, that sort of thing.”
He points to the fact that both Schimel and Crawford are running a barrage of crime-related ads around the state. “And I think that everyone’s trying to find an issue that breaks through to voters right now, because the ads are so similar, right?” he says. “I think you see in these last couple weeks a transition towards these parents’ rights issues as a way to break through all the noise for voters right now.”
Approach used heavily in the 2024 presidential race
Erin Reed, a trans journalist who’s been following LGBTQ legislation around the country, says the use of anti-trans ads began during the 2019 campaign against Democratic Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear.
The Trump campaign then leaned heavily into anti-trans messaging in the final weeks before the November 2024 election. At the time Kelley Robinson, president of the Human Rights Campaign, which advocates for LGBTQ rights, told NPR that she was, "Not looking for [Democrats] to kind of engage in the fearmongering. I'm looking for them to show that they're candidates that can pull this country together and that won't use divisiveness as a political tactic."
Reed says messaging like this has detrimental effects on the lives of trans people. She says the ads during the presidential cycle were primarily on things like sports, “But whenever you actually see the policies that [the candidates] implement whenever they take power — right now, trans people are having trouble getting passports. Trans people are having their drivers’ licenses revoked and sent old licenses. Right now, trans people are being told that they're inherently undisciplined and dishonorable and therefore not worthy of being part of the military,” she says.
“And so what I want to caution to people who listen to these ads and who might say, ‘Oh, well, maybe I feel a little bit weird about trans people in sports. Look at what they're actually doing. The harm is heavy here,” she says.
She says there’s danger in normalizing anti-trans ads as a political tactic. “I think that it's really tough as a member of the transgender community to just try to live your life and to see tens of millions of dollars flying left and right, trying to demonize you for who you are.”
High courts can weigh in on transgender rights
Reed says in some states, the state supreme court has been stronger than the federal Supreme Court when it comes to protections for LGBTQ people.
She notes that when a drag-ban in public schools and libraries was passed by the Montana legislature, its state Supreme Court stopped the law from being enforced against a transgender public speaker giving a talk at a library.
Also, she says the United States legalized gay marriage “because at first it was state supreme courts that said that gay people can get married in this state, and if they can get married in one state, then they can travel to other states and also have that marriage recognized, and that’s how we got the whole fight over gay marriage.”
Transgender rights are not currently before the Wisconsin Supreme Court. In December, the United States Supreme Court rejected an appeal from Wisconsin parents who wanted to challenge a school district’s guidance for supporting transgender students.
