Democrats have been surprisingly good at deflecting blame for the dumpster fire they’ve made of our border, the economy, and foreign policy. But there’s one problem the Left doesn’t have an answer for, and that’s their transgender activism.

In a race that could be defined by any number of far-Left failures, some people are surprised the GOP would decide to duke it out on the cultural turf. Others think it’s the perfect illustration of just how deranged the other party has become. “The divide in America today is normal versus crazy,” Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) put it bluntly. And there’s no better example than letting men compete in girls’ sports, encouraging children to cut off healthy body parts, or indulging the fantasy that we can be any other gender than what we are.

For the last several weeks, Republicans have flooded the zone with ads either exposing Kamala Harris’s taxpayer-funded-sex-changes-for-inmates scheme, or the dress-wearing men in high-ranking administration jobs, or the towering boys competing against our country’s daughters. “Kamala is for they/them. President Trump is for you,” one of the more memorable commercials ends.

From the presidential race to tight Senate and House contests, conservatives are hitching their wagon to a cause Democrats can’t — or won’t — explain. And spending a pretty penny in the process. At last count, the GOP had poured as much as $85 million into this messaging, which strategists agree has been surprisingly effective. “It’s one of the issues where Democrats are furthest from the center of the country,” Brad Todd, a Republican who’s produced commercials on transgender issues in multiple races this year, told The New York Times. “They are doing something that is totally illogical to appease a tiny slice that is very radical in their base.”

Worse, Harris and her party are trying to ignore the controversy, which is the same losing strategy Republicans tried on abortion. The difference is that conservatives have strong and compelling reasons for embracing life, they just refused to voice them. On this issue, there is no good or persuasive explanation for ignoring biology or overriding parents, science, and thousands of years of human history — and Democrats know it.

To her extreme base, Harris’s silence is becoming a problem. From The New York Times to wealthy allies like the Human Rights Campaign, the dodge is unacceptable. The campaigns’ responses are “abysmal,” Samantha Riedel wrote angrily. “One might assume that Democrats … would be prepared to offer a strong public rebuttal that defends trans people while highlighting the GOP’s petty bigotries. One would be wrong.” Instead of defending trans policy, she points out, liberal candidates like Senator Ted Cruz’s (R-Texas) opponent have actually “capitulat[ed]” to the GOP’s position.

After the Cruz team accused Rep. Colin Allard (D) of supporting the “sterilization” of children and unfairness in girls’ sports, his challenger released an ad siding with the conservative position. “I don’t want boys playing girls’ sports or any of this ridiculous stuff that Ted Cruz is saying,” he declared. To the horror of the hard-core Left, “In all these cases and more, Democrats have either sidestepped Republican attacks on trans people or regurgitated their opponents’ framing altogether,” Riedel fumed.

Shades of the same attacks have hit hard in other races, where incumbent Democrats have the unfortunate baggage of voting against women’s sports in the current Congress. To most Americans’ surprise, not one Democrat in the House or Senate has had the moral courage to protect our girls from the devastation and injury done by men who overpower their opponents and invade their personal spaces. And these are, The Atlantic pointed out, “the positions that Democrats won’t defend.”

“Up and down the ballot,” the Times notes, “Democratic candidates have mostly tried to ignore the onslaught, preferring to pivot toward more favorable policy terrain, such as abortion, rather than to be dragged into public debates on transgender issues. Privately, though, Democratic strategists concede that the transgender attacks are taking a toll in some races. The most aired Trump ad in recent weeks was rated as one of his campaign’s more effective in September in some Democratic testing,” the outlet found.

Pollsters say the conservative messaging seems to really resonate with voters. “One of the things you see in the focus groups is the moms get visibly angry on this issue,” Jim McLaughlin explained to the Times. “It’s a fairness issue. They don’t want their daughters to lose a scholarship, and they don’t want them to get hurt.” To be honest, the National Republican Senatorial Committee’s Mike Berg said, “It’s the social issue that Democrats are furthest away from the center of America on.”

Although Harris has tried (unsuccessfully) to stay out of the fray, her record of trans advocacy is impossible to shake. Together with her boss, the most LGBT-obsessed president ever to serve, the former senator has tried to radically rewrite Title IX to favor biological men — exactly the kind of discrimination the policy was designed to combat. On top of erasing all the gains made by women in the last half-century, the White House duo is trying to strongarm the changes through. “They back-doored this,” Republican convert Tulsi Gabbard argued, and then threatened to withhold the federal dollars of schools that refused to comply.

And why would they have to “back door” it? Because they know the American people overwhelmingly oppose the idea. Just this week, Rasmussen Reports released one of the most damning polls on Harris’s position, finding just 11% of likely voters who strongly supported men competing in girls’ sports. Overall, only 25% favored the idea, while the intensity of the opposition continued to grow. On top of the huge majority who reject the idea, 50% now strongly oppose it.

As FRC Action Director Matt Carpenter told The Washington Stand, “The political discourse is catching up to what consumers have been saying in the marketplace for the past few years: They’ve had enough of gender ideology blurring the lines between male and female. The past two Pride Months have seen shareholders ditch shares in companies that peddled in trans activism to their customers, and now voters across the country are poised to ditch campaigns that support men in women’s sports, teaching gender ideology to kindergarteners, and using taxpayer funds to pay for gender transitions.”

For Democrats, the entire debate uncovers a serious vulnerability. “I think the Republican Party and the Democratic Party perceive these issues very, very differently. And I think the Republicans may have it a little bit more right in terms of what voters feel and fear than the Democrats,” New York Times Opinion Columnist M. Gessen acknowledged. Asked how she thought Harris was responding to those concerns, she replied, “not well.” “She spends very little time speaking directly to these anxieties.”

That’s why, The Wall Street Journal believes, this could be the “sleeper issue” of the election. “Last year 69% of Americans told Gallup that “transgender athletes should only be allowed to compete on sports teams that conform with their birth gender,” WSJ noted. “This isn’t bigotry. For most Americans it’s a matter of fairness, as well as the equal opportunity for women in sports enshrined in Title IX. Not long ago most Democrats believed in that principle. But these days the hard edge of the transgender movement has dictated that its view of gender must be imposed nationwide. Senate Democrats have toed that line.” And frankly, the paper predicted, “It might cost Democrats control of Congress this year.”

Another sign that Harris is in deep trouble is that even her most reliable friends — the media — won’t cover for her on this issue. Fact-checkers have reluctantly called the claim that she wants to finance prisoner and migrant sex changes “true,” while Trump seizes every moment to paint the position as terrifyingly woke. “How about this — pushing transgender ideology onto minor children?” the former president said in Pennsylvania recently. “… Your child goes to school, and they take your child. It was a he, comes back as a she. And they do it, often, without parental consent.”

The reality is, “Even if Harris isn’t talking about gender, everyone else is,” NBC News pointed out, adding (somewhat comically) that the vice president had declined to comment on her silence.

Time will tell if Republicans bet on a flaw fatal enough to topple the Dems’ 2024 chances. At the very least, they’ve exacted a big price for the party’s insanity, National Review’s Rich Lowry points out. “The chickens have come home to roost,” he quipped, “and they’re all cisgender.”