On September 17, the American Principles Project sent a three-page memo to Republican candidates about how to win the midterms. If you follow trans politics, you know the name. APP is the group that ran the first anti-trans sports ads back in 2019, and it has spent the years since telling Republicans that attacking us wins elections. That’s why it was news when this memo told candidates that hammering Democrats on trans issues and DEI “may not be sufficient” on its own this November.
Erin Reed read the memo as a sign that the ads are failing, and I think she’s right. But there’s more in it than a concession. The memo also exaggerates what these attacks have done for Republicans, the way APP has for seven years. And after admitting that the old message isn’t enough, it offers candidates a new one built around Charlie Kirk’s murder, even though the man charged with killing him isn’t transgender.
What APP Admitted
Let’s start with the concession, because it’s real. The memo opens by admitting that Republicans “face significant headwinds” this year. It still wants candidates to go after Democrats on trans issues and on diversity, equity and inclusion programs. But it warns that pressing those issues “alone, while important, may not be sufficient,” and that Republicans also need to show families how they’ll help them economically. A page later, it calls the Republican pitch on the economy “at best unclear.”
Terry Schilling, APP’s president, was blunter when he talked to the Washington Examiner. Republicans are “doing great” on the culture war, he said, but they’re “not appealing enough to working class families and young people.” David McIntosh of the conservative Club for Growth told the same reporter that voters had more energy for trans issues in 2024 than they do now, because they care more about the economy.
Even the memo’s best number isn’t about us. Its top-scoring message says Democrats’ DEI policies hurt young men, and APP says that message moved its Ohio governor’s race test by 10.6 points. That’s well above anything the memo reports about trans people. When the group that built its brand on attacking us puts its biggest number somewhere else and admits Republicans don’t have a clear economic message, I’m inclined to take it at its word.
What APP Exaggerated
The memo still insists the old message works. It says Trump’s 2024 win “showed definitively” that these attacks help Republicans. It says messages about “men in women’s sports and spaces” moved voters up to 6.6 points toward Republicans in its testing, that messages about tax dollars paying for “sex changes” moved them up to 4 points, and that an ad about James Talarico moved Texas voters 5.7 points toward Ken Paxton.
There’s no way for a reader to check those numbers. The memo names no pollster and gives no sample sizes or dates, and four of its six figures are “up to,” which means the best result out of however many tests APP ran.
Where we can check the memo, it doesn’t hold up well. It claims that nearly every major Democratic candidate this cycle has supported “sex-change procedures for minors.” Three weeks earlier, PolitiFact reported that Talarico and Josh Turek in Iowa both oppose gender-affirming surgeries for minors, and it had already rated an ad claiming otherwise about Turek False. The race where APP says its Talarico ad moved voters 5.7 points is also the race where the newest poll, from Texas Southern University, has Talarico ahead of Paxton 47 to 46.
APP has been overselling its product for a long time. In 2019, it ran its first trans-athlete ads against Andy Beshear in Kentucky, and Beshear won by 5,136 votes. Schilling later said APP’s own comparison showed the ads had “shifted 26,000 votes,” and he described what he told his donors afterward: “Listen, we came up short. It was very close. But this really works.”
In 2022, APP bragged about spending $15 million in 13 states to make “the transgender issue” a “litmus test,” and Mark Kelly, Catherine Cortez Masto and Tony Evers all won anyway. I wrote about it at Media Matters at the time.
Last October, the Daily Signal reported that APP’s polling found a message about insurance coverage for “sex changes” raised the Republican vote share in Virginia by 6.9 points, and that a message about “sex changes for minors” moved New Jersey voters by 8.2 points. APP’s memo that month said those issues had “the very real potential to deliver victory for the GOP.” Abigail Spanberger won Virginia by 15 points, and Mikie Sherrill won New Jersey by 14.
I don’t think that means APP’s tests are fake. A message test measures what one ad does to one group of people in one sitting, and an election measures everything at once. In the races where I can set APP’s numbers against a result, its side lost. In 2024, when its message looked like it was working, Donald Trump was at the top of the ticket, running his “Kamala is for they/them” ads during football games. After last November’s races, my colleagues and I argued that the right had taken the wrong lesson from those ads and mistaken the messenger for the message.
Last year’s memo told Republicans they could “overcome past trends” with the same strategy. This year’s says “the past need not be prologue.” Message testing that nobody can check is a sales pitch.
Why Charlie Kirk?
That brings us to the strangest paragraph in the memo:
“This cycle, APP also tested a new message, connecting Democrats’ opposition to true mental health treatment for gender dysphoria with the rise in violent acts being perpetrated by transgender-identified, mentally distressed individuals. These messages proved just as persuasive as those noted above, moving voters up to 6.5 points towards Republicans. Given the salience of this issue in the wake of Charlie Kirk’s murder and other similar attacks, GOP candidates would be well advised to go on offense against their Democrat opponents using this angle as well.”
After conceding that attacks on trans people may not carry Republicans through November, APP’s new idea is to tell voters that we’re violent, and the example it reaches for is Charlie Kirk. Kirk was killed a year and a week before the memo’s date, and the man charged with his murder isn’t transgender. Prosecutors say he was in a relationship with a roommate “who was considering transitioning [their] gender,” and that is the connection they have described.
The “true mental health treatment” the memo accuses Democrats of opposing is, as far as I can tell, talk therapy meant to make trans kids not trans. Colorado banned that practice for minors, and in March the Supreme Court ruled 8 to 1 that applying the ban to talk therapy has to survive the strictest test the Constitution sets.
It’s also worth saying out loud that Kirk’s murder has become a meme. In the year since he was killed, the internet has turned him into a running joke, complete with an AI-generated tribute song, “We Are Charlie Kirk,” that hit No. 1 on Spotify’s Viral 50 as people passed it around to make fun of it. The Intercept’s Katherine Krueger argued this month that the right’s insistence on treating Kirk as a saint is what turned him into a punchline. The jokes are grim, and the right has fought them hard.
But APP is counting on Kirk’s murder to make its message feel urgent to voters, especially younger voters, who have spent a year watching his name turn into a joke. That’s a strange foundation for a closing argument.
APP says this message moved voters up to 6.5 points. A focus group isn’t a poll, and APP’s testing isn’t public either, so I can only tell you what I’ve seen. In the focus groups I’ve watched where the idea of trans killers has come up, it has gotten laughed out of the room.
The record doesn’t support the idea either. Some people who have committed mass shootings have been trans, and federal officials referred to the shooter who killed two children at Annunciation Catholic Church in Minneapolis in August 2025 as transgender. I don’t think we help ourselves by pretending otherwise. But a research center at Hamline University that tracks public shootings in which four or more people are killed found that men commit 98 percent of them, women 2 percent and transgender people less than 1 percent.
The Gun Violence Archive counted 5,748 mass shootings from January 2013 through mid-September 2025 and told fact-checkers that five had confirmed transgender shooters. Even the report on “gender ideology” and political violence that the Department of Health and Human Services released in August says in its own abstract that “experimental research is needed to determine causality.”
For years, one of the first rumors after a high-profile shooting has been that the shooter was trans, and it has been false again and again. APP has now written that rumor into a memo for candidates, attached a number to it, and told Republicans to “go on offense” with it. I don’t think a group that believed its sports ads were still winning elections would reach for a murder the evidence doesn’t tie to us.
What Democrats Should Take From It
Some of this memo is good news for us. The group that built the anti-trans attack ad has told its own candidates that the ad may not be enough and that their economic message is missing.
Look no further than Ohio. Sherrod Brown lost his Senate seat by less than four points in 2024 under this same attack. This year he’s running an ad that reportedly cost more than $200,000 in which Ohio voters ask, “With everything going on, that’s what they’re talking about?” before it moves on to groceries, gas and health care. Bowling Green State University’s September poll has him leading Jon Husted 48 to 45.
I know how that ad lands for some of us. One of its voters says, “In Ohio, it’s against the law to perform transgender surgeries on kids. That’s right, it’s illegal,” and the ad treats a ban on our care as settled. I would have liked him to say something else. But APP’s own memo explains the logic of that ad, and I’d rather see Democrats answer these attacks by changing the subject than by agreeing with them.
If Republicans do run the Charlie Kirk message in October, I don’t expect voters to take it any more seriously than the focus groups I’ve watched did. The man charged with killing Kirk isn’t trans, and five shooters out of 5,748 mass shootings is not a rise in violence.
APP just told its own candidates that attacking us may not be enough. I’d like Democrats to answer these attacks with a defense of us, and I’m going to keep asking for one. But between now and November 3, I’ll take the question about groceries.
