Take this coming from someone who has not seen a US political ad in the wild, possibly ever.
Isn't another issue is that, prior to running the "they/them" ad, the Trump campaign successfully nailed Harris to her 2020 position (free sex change operations for illegal immigrants)? It's the difference between throwing haymakers at the air, and having your opponent cornered. In the first place, you counter it by simply not being there/engaging, in the second place your biggest mistake was getting trapped in the first place.
Yes, good point. And that probably contributed to Earle-Sears coming across as something of a culture warrior nut -- she was really grasping at straws.
Exactly! Spanberger, whatever her flaws, isn’t a culture warrior. She’s ex-CIA, comes as off a (very impressive) suburban mom. Had she had that history, or a history of saying “defund the police,” it would be a different story. The first I heard of her was in 2020, in a leaked profanity laced screed where she was very mad at the left wing members of the house who cost them a bigger majority.
I also think Earle-Sears is just a very odd person. She has a phenomenal biography for a politician, but is legitimately a nut, and doesn’t hide it well.
I also feel like another thing here is they/them ad as an opposition party and they/them as as a ruling party give you totally different impression too - like the former can function to make the ruling party unserious about your economic concern while the latter shows you as a ruling party actually don’t give af about the economic concern and focus on some weird shit
Yeah, the 2024 message comes off to voters "the economy is shit because these people are so out of touch." In 2025, it comes off as "hey, how can you possibly care about the shitty economy and government shutdown when these people are so out of touch? Helloooo, is this thing on?!"
It also has to be said that 2025 simply isn’t 2024. Wokeness isn’t dead, but it is simply not as salient an issue as it used to be, even after only a year. Which means being anti-woke is not as motivating as it once was.
Also, people don’t like it when you shamelessly copy other ads
There's also the matter that people being tired of wokeness doesn't mean they have the appetite for the aggressive anti-wokeness of the Trump administration. They just want everyone to shut up. Democrats were wisely the side that did shut up this time.
Yeah like ppl find some of the aggressive ideas for trans ppl out of touch don’t mean “hello all trans ppl must die” is an appealing message but maladjusted wackos prob thought that’s the message they got…
This is also true for Dems where some of staffer classes are out of touch but I argue it is worse on GOP side bc the current GOP staffer classes are even more out of touch steeped in 4ch memes AND high level officers are also more or less like that - like there’s no way your feedback loop functions normally if you have ppl like Hegseth at the top
A wise man once wrote that successful comedy requires audience buy-in. The same goes for successful politics.
But more importantly, “Retarded Reich” and “the splooge twins” made me laugh out loud. And “Retarded Reich and the Splooge Twins” could have been the name of a band you would have heard at CBGBs in 1978.
You’re wrong about Richmond being Civil War reenactors and meth farmers. That stopped in the early aughts. Today, Richmond has a diversified economy that runs on tattoo parlors, chain wallets and ennui.
The other key difference: the Trump ad not only had the tagline, but attacked Kamala based on stuff she *actually said* at the height of the 2020 progressive lunacy orgy. She couldn't really run from those comments. I don't know Spanberger, but I'll guess that she didn't carry the same baggage, or if she did, it wasn't prominent enough to detract voters from the kitchen table issues she was hammering. The president presiding over a shitty economy being a Republican rather than a Democrat inevitably helps, too.
I'm a Virginia ticket splitter (voted Spanberger + Republicans).
Winsome Earl-Sears was a terrible candidate. She seemed to be motivated by her conservative Christian values... and not much else. I had the impression that she would cut the budget in a sloppy, stupid way, because she doesn't understand or appreciate what government does -- just wants less of it, and tax cuts. We'd lose out on business thanks to her very right-wing views on abortion and gay marriage. It would just be bad.
I actually care a lot about pushing back on the trans madness, but not enough to doom the entire Commonwealth. The DOGE cuts, shutdown, and other Trump policies have hit Virginia hard, and people are legitimately worried about economic security. We couldn't afford to have a governor who's too dumb and disinterested to get us through it.
I agree with vou. I hate when people (especially men) trv to boil the trans issue down to vour daughter losing a sports match. That's patronizing AF and doesn't touch on the enormity of Title IX being changed from equal opportunities for women to equal opportunities for anvone who self identifies as a woman. Changing women as a sex class to people who throw on a dress if they feel like it. Women having to accept men into bathrooms, locker rooms, prison cells, sports competitions, DV shelters, rape shelters, sororities and dorm rooms if they claim to be women. Grown adult men in these places with minor girls. This guy was protected after being caught in Virginia exposing himself multiple times in multiple spaces to women and minor girls before finally being charged with indecent exposure. How do you explain to your minor daughter that this is really a woman with a girl dick and she should just ignore it? Side note: this only touches on the many issues and notablv none of them affect male spaces.
I used to live in NOVA and I have the exact opposite feeling about the DOGE cuts. I felt most people in NOVA had fake gov/contractor jobs and our wealth was fake. Cutting out the fat seems quite a good thing for the country, even if it affects housing values in NOVA.
Spanberger 'said local school districts and schools should decide locker room and sports team policies for transgender girls, before adding: “There should never be nude men in locker rooms.”' (Washington Post, 11/2/25)
Harris refused to address the trans issue AT ALL even after indications that the "they/them" ad was effective. Spanberger learned from this mistake and addressed the issue in a moderate way. And somehow, the Church of Trans loons refrained from calling her a "NAZI" for that last heretical remark about "nude men"! (It's a miracle!) No doubt Seth Moulton, who's already been called a Nazi, is taking notes for his primary run against Ed Markey who at a rally literally draped himself in a trans flag -- damn he looked ridiculous. If you haven't seen that photo, check it out!
I like moderates' recent pivot into "let local school districts decide" because it's a tacit admission of defeat, despite being against Virginia law in one way and against federal law (Title IX) in exactly the opposite way. At the local level, it becomes obvious that nobody really wants this except a few mentally ill, attention-seeking boys and their virtue-signaling AWFL moms.
Two-thirds of Democrats don't want biological boys in girls' sports, while 99%+ of our elected Democrats support it or rather, pretend to support it lest they get called "NAZIS" -- but the tide is turning at last.
I feel like issue salience played a big part in why this worked for Trump and not Earle Sears. The entire issue (including it's place in sports) was mostly made salient because political and thought leaders on the right forced it into relevance. It's not something that affects that many people, and there's not a lot of energy behind it on the left. But it feels like since Trump was elected, the right has just kind of pivoted away from it.
With Trump in power, it no longer serves the function of demonstrating America's horrific decline into woke communism under General Secretary Biden (he/him). The narrative they can control has to instead focus either on how amazing he is, or how political enemies are plotting to destroy him, and the narrative they don't control is focused on stuff like the economy, tariffs, corruption, and excesses of immigration enforcement. Without the entire cultural apparatus around it insisting on its significance, it just doesn't feel as important to anyone.
Aside from that, it probably is also the case that Virginia's moderate conservatives and centrists have a larger faction of the old "country club Republican" types who aren't that far to the right on cultural issues and mostly vote for Republicans because they want their taxes cut compared with the nation as a whole, and they're just less concerned by the issue and more likely to find people who are a bit weird, especially when the Democrat opponent doesn't really track as especially radical or left wing.
Yeah, this is something a lot of people don't realize when it comes to bashing Democrats on cultural issues—much of this is out of their control because Republicans have a lot invested in portraying Democrats as being culturally extreme, and they have a sprawling propaganda network in place—complete with fake news stations—to amplify the most unhinged voices on the left.
That's not to say that there aren't ways for Democrats to counter this, but they have to do so explicitly and loudly, and Republicans count on Democrats not being able to walk that fine line of being in line with most Americans without seeming like they're punching down on constituencies that support them. Sadly, they're going to have to figure it out.
My solution would be to publicly make forceful but generic entreaties to individual rights. You don't have to be all that specific, but with regard to certain transgender issues you might have to say something like, "doesn't sound like a good idea to me, but I don't really spend a good deal of time thinking about it, not really my priority" and then remind people what is your priority and point out how your opponents don't want to talk about the important stuff.
And behind the scenes be straight with LGBTQ organizations—tell them that you can't help them if you don't get elected, and that they shouldn't look to the President to change the culture. That they need to focus on protecting their rights and not forcing their ideology into the mainstream under threat of labeling people bigots, because that's only going to backfire. That's got to come gradually.
I feel like youre projecting the modern Democratic attitude on woke politics (which is to say, something they dont really talk about unless prompted by Republicans) onto woke era Democrats. Who were very energized on the issue as well. That usually came across through HR departments, school systems, and Hollywood, but all of those things are correctly understood by most people as liberal institutions. The Republicans didn't need to invent anything.
Republicans still tried to keep the conversation there after the 2024 election and couldn't, because it was obvious the left had pivoted. If it was just a matter of Republicans injecting the issues of their choice then they never would have dropped it.
Another reason her repetition of the "they/them" ad may not have landed the same way is that it's a play on words that everybody has already heard. Honestly how many times do people laugh at the same punchline?
Virginia is a government town. DOGE and the government shutdown was the reason that these voters went Democrat. Voters don't just vote for the economy, they vote for economic issues that impact them. I think it was just bad timing for Earle-Sears.
Here in the Community Formerly Known As Gay, GLAAD used to make us glaad but now seems determined to bully us and make us saad... that is, when they deign to think about us GL peasants at all.
Oh yeah, there's a lot of "LGB dump the T" sentiment recently. Anyone interested in the topic should take a look at a new Substack called Escaping the Rainbow Plantation. "Gender affirming care" for minors is particularly disturbing because about 80% of these poor kids are or would become gay or lesbian. I should also mention, Jeff Maurer's friend & comedy partner Jesse Singal has gone very "deep into the weeds" researching GAC and writes about it often in his Substack, Singal-Minded.
RE: "All of these things are about whether voters trust you or not".
Or in the case of old bastards like me who spend most of their time yelling at kids to get off the lawn, it's about whether voters distrust you the least...
Face it, these people are triggered, angry and no way were they going to vote for anything but a Democrat.
The real horror comes in the coming years when they are bent on savage revenge. The moment Trump's out, they get all their security clearances and jobs back, and they start wrecking America like fascist agents in the USSR did to clothes factories.
Take this coming from someone who has not seen a US political ad in the wild, possibly ever.
Isn't another issue is that, prior to running the "they/them" ad, the Trump campaign successfully nailed Harris to her 2020 position (free sex change operations for illegal immigrants)? It's the difference between throwing haymakers at the air, and having your opponent cornered. In the first place, you counter it by simply not being there/engaging, in the second place your biggest mistake was getting trapped in the first place.
Yes, good point. And that probably contributed to Earle-Sears coming across as something of a culture warrior nut -- she was really grasping at straws.
Exactly! Spanberger, whatever her flaws, isn’t a culture warrior. She’s ex-CIA, comes as off a (very impressive) suburban mom. Had she had that history, or a history of saying “defund the police,” it would be a different story. The first I heard of her was in 2020, in a leaked profanity laced screed where she was very mad at the left wing members of the house who cost them a bigger majority.
I also think Earle-Sears is just a very odd person. She has a phenomenal biography for a politician, but is legitimately a nut, and doesn’t hide it well.
I also feel like another thing here is they/them ad as an opposition party and they/them as as a ruling party give you totally different impression too - like the former can function to make the ruling party unserious about your economic concern while the latter shows you as a ruling party actually don’t give af about the economic concern and focus on some weird shit
Yeah, the 2024 message comes off to voters "the economy is shit because these people are so out of touch." In 2025, it comes off as "hey, how can you possibly care about the shitty economy and government shutdown when these people are so out of touch? Helloooo, is this thing on?!"
Yeahhh totally!
And I think a couple of ppl called it but it is just so remarkable Trump admin and GOP seemed to take the exact wrong lessons from 2024
It also has to be said that 2025 simply isn’t 2024. Wokeness isn’t dead, but it is simply not as salient an issue as it used to be, even after only a year. Which means being anti-woke is not as motivating as it once was.
Also, people don’t like it when you shamelessly copy other ads
There's also the matter that people being tired of wokeness doesn't mean they have the appetite for the aggressive anti-wokeness of the Trump administration. They just want everyone to shut up. Democrats were wisely the side that did shut up this time.
Yeah like ppl find some of the aggressive ideas for trans ppl out of touch don’t mean “hello all trans ppl must die” is an appealing message but maladjusted wackos prob thought that’s the message they got…
This is also true for Dems where some of staffer classes are out of touch but I argue it is worse on GOP side bc the current GOP staffer classes are even more out of touch steeped in 4ch memes AND high level officers are also more or less like that - like there’s no way your feedback loop functions normally if you have ppl like Hegseth at the top
That's a very good point!
I believe some internet troll
dug up the 2020 ACLU postcard of death and then Trumps dogs chewed it up like a fresh bone.
I think I heard that explainer recently on Bocked and Reported where Katie Herzog got the story out of right wing grifter Brad Polumbo, who
occasionally punches down on
a far right nut to make himself look "centrist."
A wise man once wrote that successful comedy requires audience buy-in. The same goes for successful politics.
But more importantly, “Retarded Reich” and “the splooge twins” made me laugh out loud. And “Retarded Reich and the Splooge Twins” could have been the name of a band you would have heard at CBGBs in 1978.
I heard my doctor refer to my testicles as the splooge twins moments before the anesthesia kicked in, and man did I wake up worried.
I didn't realize a wise man wrote that before Maurer wrote about it on this blog!
"Yeet the Skeet Vasectomy Center and Gun Range" is a fine facility Sir!
Those aren't clay pigeons.
You’re wrong about Richmond being Civil War reenactors and meth farmers. That stopped in the early aughts. Today, Richmond has a diversified economy that runs on tattoo parlors, chain wallets and ennui.
Nah. Richmond is full of bankers, lawyers, state employees, and restauranteurs, with a pretty good smattering of hipsters.
"than T-Mobile runs about their network giving you 5G coverage at the bottom of the Mariana Trench."
Hey! My bottom's not that big. Anyway I'm on Ozempic.
The other key difference: the Trump ad not only had the tagline, but attacked Kamala based on stuff she *actually said* at the height of the 2020 progressive lunacy orgy. She couldn't really run from those comments. I don't know Spanberger, but I'll guess that she didn't carry the same baggage, or if she did, it wasn't prominent enough to detract voters from the kitchen table issues she was hammering. The president presiding over a shitty economy being a Republican rather than a Democrat inevitably helps, too.
I'm a Virginia ticket splitter (voted Spanberger + Republicans).
Winsome Earl-Sears was a terrible candidate. She seemed to be motivated by her conservative Christian values... and not much else. I had the impression that she would cut the budget in a sloppy, stupid way, because she doesn't understand or appreciate what government does -- just wants less of it, and tax cuts. We'd lose out on business thanks to her very right-wing views on abortion and gay marriage. It would just be bad.
I actually care a lot about pushing back on the trans madness, but not enough to doom the entire Commonwealth. The DOGE cuts, shutdown, and other Trump policies have hit Virginia hard, and people are legitimately worried about economic security. We couldn't afford to have a governor who's too dumb and disinterested to get us through it.
I agree with vou. I hate when people (especially men) trv to boil the trans issue down to vour daughter losing a sports match. That's patronizing AF and doesn't touch on the enormity of Title IX being changed from equal opportunities for women to equal opportunities for anvone who self identifies as a woman. Changing women as a sex class to people who throw on a dress if they feel like it. Women having to accept men into bathrooms, locker rooms, prison cells, sports competitions, DV shelters, rape shelters, sororities and dorm rooms if they claim to be women. Grown adult men in these places with minor girls. This guy was protected after being caught in Virginia exposing himself multiple times in multiple spaces to women and minor girls before finally being charged with indecent exposure. How do you explain to your minor daughter that this is really a woman with a girl dick and she should just ignore it? Side note: this only touches on the many issues and notablv none of them affect male spaces.
I used to live in NOVA and I have the exact opposite feeling about the DOGE cuts. I felt most people in NOVA had fake gov/contractor jobs and our wealth was fake. Cutting out the fat seems quite a good thing for the country, even if it affects housing values in NOVA.
Spanberger 'said local school districts and schools should decide locker room and sports team policies for transgender girls, before adding: “There should never be nude men in locker rooms.”' (Washington Post, 11/2/25)
Harris refused to address the trans issue AT ALL even after indications that the "they/them" ad was effective. Spanberger learned from this mistake and addressed the issue in a moderate way. And somehow, the Church of Trans loons refrained from calling her a "NAZI" for that last heretical remark about "nude men"! (It's a miracle!) No doubt Seth Moulton, who's already been called a Nazi, is taking notes for his primary run against Ed Markey who at a rally literally draped himself in a trans flag -- damn he looked ridiculous. If you haven't seen that photo, check it out!
I like moderates' recent pivot into "let local school districts decide" because it's a tacit admission of defeat, despite being against Virginia law in one way and against federal law (Title IX) in exactly the opposite way. At the local level, it becomes obvious that nobody really wants this except a few mentally ill, attention-seeking boys and their virtue-signaling AWFL moms.
Two-thirds of Democrats don't want biological boys in girls' sports, while 99%+ of our elected Democrats support it or rather, pretend to support it lest they get called "NAZIS" -- but the tide is turning at last.
I feel like issue salience played a big part in why this worked for Trump and not Earle Sears. The entire issue (including it's place in sports) was mostly made salient because political and thought leaders on the right forced it into relevance. It's not something that affects that many people, and there's not a lot of energy behind it on the left. But it feels like since Trump was elected, the right has just kind of pivoted away from it.
With Trump in power, it no longer serves the function of demonstrating America's horrific decline into woke communism under General Secretary Biden (he/him). The narrative they can control has to instead focus either on how amazing he is, or how political enemies are plotting to destroy him, and the narrative they don't control is focused on stuff like the economy, tariffs, corruption, and excesses of immigration enforcement. Without the entire cultural apparatus around it insisting on its significance, it just doesn't feel as important to anyone.
Aside from that, it probably is also the case that Virginia's moderate conservatives and centrists have a larger faction of the old "country club Republican" types who aren't that far to the right on cultural issues and mostly vote for Republicans because they want their taxes cut compared with the nation as a whole, and they're just less concerned by the issue and more likely to find people who are a bit weird, especially when the Democrat opponent doesn't really track as especially radical or left wing.
Yeah, this is something a lot of people don't realize when it comes to bashing Democrats on cultural issues—much of this is out of their control because Republicans have a lot invested in portraying Democrats as being culturally extreme, and they have a sprawling propaganda network in place—complete with fake news stations—to amplify the most unhinged voices on the left.
That's not to say that there aren't ways for Democrats to counter this, but they have to do so explicitly and loudly, and Republicans count on Democrats not being able to walk that fine line of being in line with most Americans without seeming like they're punching down on constituencies that support them. Sadly, they're going to have to figure it out.
My solution would be to publicly make forceful but generic entreaties to individual rights. You don't have to be all that specific, but with regard to certain transgender issues you might have to say something like, "doesn't sound like a good idea to me, but I don't really spend a good deal of time thinking about it, not really my priority" and then remind people what is your priority and point out how your opponents don't want to talk about the important stuff.
And behind the scenes be straight with LGBTQ organizations—tell them that you can't help them if you don't get elected, and that they shouldn't look to the President to change the culture. That they need to focus on protecting their rights and not forcing their ideology into the mainstream under threat of labeling people bigots, because that's only going to backfire. That's got to come gradually.
I feel like youre projecting the modern Democratic attitude on woke politics (which is to say, something they dont really talk about unless prompted by Republicans) onto woke era Democrats. Who were very energized on the issue as well. That usually came across through HR departments, school systems, and Hollywood, but all of those things are correctly understood by most people as liberal institutions. The Republicans didn't need to invent anything.
Republicans still tried to keep the conversation there after the 2024 election and couldn't, because it was obvious the left had pivoted. If it was just a matter of Republicans injecting the issues of their choice then they never would have dropped it.
Somehow Winsome-Earle was able to run as the weirdest gubernatorial candidate in Virginia since the guy who went to jail for tobacco health pills.
Another reason her repetition of the "they/them" ad may not have landed the same way is that it's a play on words that everybody has already heard. Honestly how many times do people laugh at the same punchline?
Virginia is a government town. DOGE and the government shutdown was the reason that these voters went Democrat. Voters don't just vote for the economy, they vote for economic issues that impact them. I think it was just bad timing for Earle-Sears.
> losing our job and being forced to start an OnlyFans where we let a goat nibble at a sprig of broccoli pinched between our asscheeks
Geez, thanks a lot for setting that as my mental imagery for the day!
I have to say I was shocked that the "business 'magician'" section didn't end in a Gob Bluth reference.
Footnote #2 got me on a bit of a Wiki spiral where I learned there is a GLAAD, a GLADD, and a GLAD LAW.
Here in the Community Formerly Known As Gay, GLAAD used to make us glaad but now seems determined to bully us and make us saad... that is, when they deign to think about us GL peasants at all.
I recently found out about the TNBGQ community. Does that mean the LGBs are divorcing them?
Oh yeah, there's a lot of "LGB dump the T" sentiment recently. Anyone interested in the topic should take a look at a new Substack called Escaping the Rainbow Plantation. "Gender affirming care" for minors is particularly disturbing because about 80% of these poor kids are or would become gay or lesbian. I should also mention, Jeff Maurer's friend & comedy partner Jesse Singal has gone very "deep into the weeds" researching GAC and writes about it often in his Substack, Singal-Minded.
RE: "All of these things are about whether voters trust you or not".
Or in the case of old bastards like me who spend most of their time yelling at kids to get off the lawn, it's about whether voters distrust you the least...
Face it, these people are triggered, angry and no way were they going to vote for anything but a Democrat.
The real horror comes in the coming years when they are bent on savage revenge. The moment Trump's out, they get all their security clearances and jobs back, and they start wrecking America like fascist agents in the USSR did to clothes factories.