Chief Gunderson
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mgunderson.bsky.social
Chief Gunderson
@mgunderson.bsky.social
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ya gotta have a breakfast Margie
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quinnae.com
When I was researching this essay I was struck by the fact that a key piece of evidence used to support the idea that the "they/them" ad was decisive is, apparently, unverifiable to the public.

That inconvenience didn't stop a stampede of people waving the 2.7% figure around like a bloody shirt.
The onslaught of anti-trans media coverage in mainstream outlets like the New York Times, or anti-trans advertising by the far-right, has certainly had the effect of blunting public support for trans rights. This is depressing but should also be understood in terms of the indifference paradigm: past support was tepid, but so is present-day antipathy. So, what happened in 2024? The pundits who trumpet trans rights' electoral toxicity love to cite a study by Future Forward, a pro-Harris SuperPAC, which suggested that the “Kamala is for they/them” ad shifted the race towards Trump by 2.7 points. Citations of this study are everywhere, though nearly all of them are links to the same New York Times article published on November 7th, 2024—including Wikipedia’s own citation of the study in its article about the infamous ad. A veritable bumper crop of blog posts, op-eds, and articles citing that study through the Times analysis emerged, all of them portraying the ad as uniquely effective. The FiveThirtyEight subreddit was almost unanimous in its praise for the ad and its purported power. As I was researching this essay, however, it struck me as odd that all of these blogs, essays, and social media posts linked to or cited that same Times article when quoting the figure. As it turns out, getting one’s hands on the original Future Forward study and its data is tricky, to say the least. The UK newspaper, The Independent, was unable to even get ahold of them to ask questions. The focus groups that were conducted by Future Forward are likely real, but how they arrived at the 2.7% figure remains a mystery.
December 1, 2025 at 9:57 PM