John Fetterman Says Certain Trump Ad Helped Clinch His Victory

Pennsylvania U.S. Senator John Fetterman suggested that Republicans’ messaging around transgender rights may have helped propel the former president back into the White House.
During an interview with Semafor published on Friday, Fetterman, a Democrat, was asked about the GOP spending millions of dollars on advertisements attacking transgender rights, which aired in key swing states like Pennsylvania in the weeks leading up to Tuesday’s election.
The ads often included a clip of Vice President Kamala Harris saying during her 2020 presidential campaign that she supported gender-affirming medical treatment for transgender people in prison. The tagline at the end: “Kamala is for ‘they/them.’ President Trump is for you.”
Fetterman, who has been an advocate for the transgender community since being elected to Congress in 2022, told Semafor that while he refuses “to throw members of the gay or trans communities under the bus,” the messaging around LGBTQ+ issues may have hurt Democrats this election cycle.
“[I]t’s also true, undeniably, that if someone ran for president in 2020 and pandered to that Squad mentality, or to get likes on Twitter, and they made those kinds of statements about gender, they were going to be pretty hard to defend. That was going to get weaponized,” Fetterman said.
“And it’s undeniable that Republicans created a really powerful message: ‘She’s for they/them, and Trump is for you,'” the senator added. “That kept hitting again and again and again and again for 10s of millions of dollars. It had an earworm quality. And I’m not surprised that that resonated.”
Republicans have ramped up attacks on LGBTQ+ policies in recent years, particularly at the state and local level. According to the American Civil Liberties Union, 532 anti-LGBTQ+ bills were filed across the United States in 2024 alone.
Trump claimed on the campaign trail that if reelected, he would “get [the] transgender insanity the hell out of our schools, and we will keep men out of women’s sports.”
Conversely, the Biden-Harris administration has been an advocate for transgender people over the past four years. Harris’ campaign never directly responded to the attacks that Trump threw out in his advertisements, but the vice president corrected her opponent’s mischaracterizations of her policies involving the LGBTQ+ community.
During an interview with NBC News in October, when asked if she believes transgender Americans should have access to gender-affirming care, Harris said, “I think we should follow the law.”
“I believe that people, as the law states, even on this issue about federal law, that that is a decision that doctors will make in terms of what is medically necessary,” Harris said, adding that Trump was “running tens of millions of dollars in ads” on the topic “to distract from the fact that his policy and plan is also to take away the, the Affordable Care Act, which provides health care for tens of millions of people in our country.”
A handful of Democrats have suggested that their party’s messaging on transgender issues could have cost them votes in the election. New York Representative Tom Suozzi told The New York Times on Wednesday, “The Democrats have to stop pandering to the far left. I don’t want to discriminate against anybody, but I don’t think biological boys should be playing in girls’ sports.”
Massachusetts Representative Seth Moulton echoed Suozzi while speaking to the Times on Thursday, saying, “Democrats spend way too much time trying not to offend anyone rather than being brutally honest about the challenges many Americans face.”
“I have two little girls,” Moulton added. “I don’t want them getting run over on a playing field by a male or formerly male athlete, but as a Democrat, I’m supposed to be afraid to say that.”
Moulton’s comments sparked immense backlash from his fellow Massachusetts Democrats. According to The Boston Globe, a top aide to Moulton resigned on Thursday after the comments.
Independent Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont told the Times earlier this week that the Democratic Party “has become a party of identity politics, rather than understanding that the vast majority of people in this country are working class.” He also released a scathing statement claiming that Democrats had “abandoned working class people.”
Jamie Harrison, chairman of the Democratic National Committee, rebuked Sanders’ statement, saying on Wednesday that President Joe Biden is “the most pro-worker” president of his lifetime. White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre also told reporters on Thursday that the administration “respectfully” disagrees with Sanders’ statement.
“This is a president that cares certainly about the people that do get forgotten, the people who are not able to make ends meet … and so does the vice president,” Jean-Pierre added.
Newsweek reached out to Harris’ team via email for comment on Friday.