MS NOW’s Chris Hayes on Tuesday called out Republicans for rallying behind vile anti-transgender attacks in this year’s midterms, stressing that the message failed to resonate with voters.
The host — while serving on a network panel as results poured in revealing a referendum on President Donald Trump, who has caped for several acts targeting the trans community — stressed that the attacks had become “so toxic and so common and so cruel and so ceaseless” throughout the cycle.
“And it was every ad, every ad. You watch a Sunday football game, and it was, ‘These people are the reason. This is the problem. This is the thing you have to think about.’ And they pumped hundreds of millions of dollars,” Hayes said.
Republicans funneled an estimated $183 million into ads tied to targeting the trans community coming down the stretch of the midterms, per data from AdImpact highlighted by The Associated Press. (The GOP put nearly $215 million into anti-trans TV ads in 2024.)
A large chunk of such bucks reportedly took over the airwaves in Texas, where some $78 million was spent against Democrat James Talarico, who ultimately defeated Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton (R) in a historic U.S. Senate victory.
The Democrat became a frequent target of Trump world over the course of the race, with Vice President JD Vance suggesting that he was a “freak” or a pedophile for supporting trans kids and drag performers.
In his comments on MS NOW, Hayes noted that he saw man-on-the-street interviews where “hardcore Republicans” declared they were voting to get “boys out of girls’ sports.”
“And to see the repudiation of that approach, specifically, when that pollution was pumped into the discourse with hundreds of millions of dollars, that people are like, ‘I don’t care about that and I reject that,’” he said.
“There’s some salvaging of decency for people that are our neighbors and our friends and our loved ones, who are a tiny minority of this population, who somehow have become the ritualized scapegoat for an entire political party that spent hundreds of millions of dollars trying to make everyone fear and hate them.”
“I’m just very, very grateful that that did not work.”