A Lesson for Republicans: Mean, Implausible Lies Do Not Win Elections

Without a positive message to run on, Republicans leaned into gratuitous personal insults of their opponents, thinking that’s worked for Trump before. But it didn’t, and doesn't.

Dear readers,

During the closing weeks of this campaign season, I was repeatedly dumbfounded by the way Republicans talked to voters about Democrats. Filled with contempt for their opponents, they spoke to voters as if they could not imagine anyone who did not share that contempt. They told nasty, mean, personal lies that they clearly expected their audiences to eat up. But the lies Republicans told weren’t plausible, they weren’t relevant to the issues voters cared about, and the gratuitousness of the lies just made Republicans even less likable than they already were.

The obvious example here is Vivek Ramaswamy’s disgusting attack ad against Ohio Governor-elect Amy Acton. But I actually want to start by talking about the bizarre tenor of the campaign against James Talarico, because I think it is the most vivid example of how Republicans lost the plot this cycle by failing to imagine a voter who wasn’t similarly consumed by hatred for Democrats.

The anti-Talarico messaging started with the obvious material: Texas Republicans seized on weird and unpopular statements and positions from his past, including comments that there are six biological sexes and that we would need to reduce meat consumption for carbon-footprint reasons. But Talarico, wisely, distanced himself from his old comments. He declared that there are only two sexes, admitted he had been “annoying” when he argued that the non-binary nature of God told us something important about public policy, and ate as much barbecue as he could on the campaign trail.

Nonetheless, Republicans persisted in falsely claiming Talarico was a vegan. They slapped him with the nicknames “low-T Talarico” and “Talafreako.” And when that didn’t work, they got weirder. A spokesperson for the Republican National Committee alleged that he had a “serious pedophile problem,” with the evidence for this incendiary claim being that he had offered to respond to text messages from his middle school students about their homework. Another RNC staffer cited an old Talarico post expressing excitement about a field trip he would lead with sixth grade boys to again imply he was a pedophile.

At a rally in October, Vice President JD Vance insinuated Talarico was gay, responding to a supporter who had shouted “I love you” with “I love you too, sir. In a totally platonic way, to be clear. I’m the vice president, not James Talarico.” (Talarico in fact has a girlfriend of four years.) Vance also engaged in the pedophile innuendo. He alleged that Talarico had “said something to the effect of ‘an 11-year-old in drag was a very beautiful thing,’” — this is an apparent reference to a Pride event Talarico once spoke at that also featured a child drag performer, though contrary to Vance’s claim, there’s no record that Talarico said anything about the drag performance or even saw it — and added that “people who say stuff like that tend to have some pretty unusual search histories.” (Vance then admitted that he was “just guessing.”)

Republicans also claimed Talarico — who is not trans — was trans. Top White House aide Stephen Miller called Talarico the “first transgender Senate candidate,” while Kari Lake, appointed by Trump to run Voice of America, suggested that Talarico had disappeared from the campaign trail in September to have a vaginoplasty. Other Republicans obsessed over a different theory of Talarico’s absence: That he had a mental breakdown and had checked into an institution in Ohio. (Talarico, a type-1 diabetic, had a rough case of the flu, and showed The New York Times video footage proving that he was at home in Austin during his time off the trail.)

Obviously, none of this worked. Talarico just won statewide in Texas by double digits, the first time any Democrat has won a statewide race there since 1994. But why did Republicans think a campaign of gratuitous, implausible and juvenile lies would work? And why did they keep trying it around the country?

Similarly to the Texas Senate race, Republican messaging against Amy Acton dripped with contempt. Vance attacked her as “a crazy person,” “an unstable maniac,” and a drunk. Her opponent Vivek Ramaswamy groused that she complained too much about having been abused as a child, saying Ohio deserved a governor with a positive vision instead of focusing so much on “what someone did to her.” And when Ramaswamy plucked Acton’s estranged mother out of the car where she was living with her cats to cut an ad calling Acton a liar,¹ Vance defended the ad, saying politics was “a tough business” and that he was “disgusted” by fellow Republicans who objected to the ad, declaring that they should “stop whining.” Ramaswamy was so convinced of the effectiveness of this nasty, unconvincing ad that he spent $4 million airing it across Ohio, before he went on to lose by a margin three points wider than GOP Senator Jon Husted. In South Carolina, Trump called Senator-elect Annie Andrews “Tranny Annie,” a nickname NRSC head Tim Scott also used for her. Needless to say, name calling didn’t work in that state either.

Obviously, Republicans are, at least in part, trying to repeat the success they had in 2024 attacking Democrats as extreme and out of touch on trans issues. But the reason the “Kamala is for they/them” ad was so devastating was that it was a clean hit: Harris really had argued that the government should pay for sex changes for prisoners (and immigration detainees), and in 2024, she was unwilling to either defend or repudiate that position. The ad stood up on that truth; it sent a credible message that she was reckless with taxpayer money, obsessed with niche identity issues, and overly attentive to the concerns of criminals. This cycle, candidates like Andrews and Talarico responded more effectively by renouncing unpopular positions; indeed, Andrews faced criticism from some trans activists for an ad in which she rejected “biological men” playing women’s sports.

But the main thing to note here is that the “they/them” ad did not allege that Kamala Harris was herself transgender. Neither did it accuse her of having a penis or being a lesbian or a vegan or having checked into a mental institution — none of that would have made any sense, but it would have been in line with the bizarre and ineffective lying Republicans have been doing this cycle.

What I see happening in the Republican Party resembles a cargo cult. The original cargo cults, which emerged in Melanesia in the wake of World War II, involved native populations acting out the behaviors of Western military personnel in an effort to manifest the delivery of food and other supplies that had once been dropped by military forces. Similarly here, Republicans saw Trump tell mean lies and win elections; therefore, they believed that if they told mean lies, they would also win elections. But mean lies are not actually at the core of Trump’s appeal², and Trump also has better judgment than some of his imitators about when it is useful to lie — or, at least he sometimes does. He did, after all, defend Ramaswamy’s gross ad, too.

Everyone is wondering what exactly the Republican Party is going to look like after Trump is gone. Perhaps one thing they could do is stop being so dishonest, unpleasant, and mean? John Cornyn suggested as much in his I-told-you-so op-ed about the Republican wipeout in Texas, in which he complained that Republican primary voters have been actively seeking out candidates with repellent personalities:

A strange reverse personality test has taken root. If a candidate talks like an affable, reasonable person, he must be a sellout. If he makes bizarre comments or has past scandals, that’s considered authenticity… This is a losing mindset that Republicans must outgrow. It selects for nominees who can’t win general elections.

I hope that Tuesday’s repudiation of nasty liars at the ballot box will lead to a return of civil and polite candidacies in Republican politics.³ After all, treating others with courtesy and respect isn’t just the right thing to do — it’s also a more effective way to campaign than whatever all this was.

Very seriously,

Josh

1. Remember, Acton and her mother agree that the two have not seen each other since Acton was 12, when Acton was removed from her mother’s care due to accusations of sexual abuse against her step-father, accusations for which he was arrested and charged prior to fleeing justice with Acton’s mother. Acton’s mother has faced legal problems and charges over the years, for fraud, animal neglect and other offenses. This is who Vivek Ramaswamy chose to make the face of his campaign!

2. Republicans and Democrats alike tend to overlook how Trump moved his party toward the center on Social Security, Medicare, gay rights and abortion while tapping into voter discontent over border chaos that establishment politicians disregarded. And then Trump himself overlooked how his political appeal had been built on promises of lower prices and no new Mideast wars. Trump has a very mixed record of political success, and his inattention to the promises that had produced those intermittent successes was the key reason Republicans were in no position to compete in these midterm elections.

3. Perhaps Utah Gov. Spencer Cox would like to run for president? The Republican Party could use some forthright Mormon virtue right about now.