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"A cares a lot about X" needn't mean "X is a vote-winner for A"; it could mean that A's elites are sincerely morally committed to X, that a Harris couldn't sleep at night if she won a cynical victory by throwing her trans immigrant sisters under the bus. Though I don't think it's trivial that she "would obviously have been better off giving the issue up" even cynically; it may very well be the case that she was stuck in a catch-22 where abandoning trans issues would have alienated as many leftists as endorsing them did moderates. (Obviously the far leftists weren't ever going to turn red, but they could have abstained, and, even more importantly, the activists cadre could have turned on the campaign in a very damaging way.)
Er, isn't Harris supposed to B? @Primaprimaprima asked @magicalkittycat why they were unwilling to give up their (leftist) perspective on trans issues if they don't actually matter. My point is that
Could certainly be the case, but her cynically playing up trans issues she doesn't really care about so the republicans waste their time on a meaningless battlefront doesn't make sense, because that 'meaningless' battlefront hurt her chances in the election. It could well be that republican politicians don't really care about trans issues and they only push them to win elections, but that wasn't what I thought you were suggesting.
(But of course republican politicians aren't telling people trans issues are an irrelevant distraction from the things that matter, even if that's what they truly believe; they're trying their absolute hardest to keep the focus on them, because they help win elections.)
OK, 'not trivial' I'll grant. It's not impossible things would have played out that way. But I still kind of doubt it. I said just 'giving up' the issues, not coming out with a full-throated denouncement (which might or might not have helped, but would have been a lot more risky). If she just mouthed platitudes about human rights and categorically refused to allow herself to get pinned down to any particular policy proposal, it's hard to see how that could have hurt. There are some issues you can't afford to shrug at, but while trans activists are surprisingly influential pound-for-pound, they never had that much reach. Did anyone even know she voiced tepid support for free gender reassignment surgery for illegal immigrant convicts before republicans dug it up? I don't think it won her many votes at all, even in the form of solidly blue voters who would have otherwise stayed home.
No, at least not in my mind; I intended A to be Blues for whom disavowing trans ideology is categorically unacceptable, and B to be Reds who don't actually care half as much as they've been pretending to ever since they discovered that grilling Blues on the normie-unfriendly aspects of trans ideology is a surefire way to make them look bad to which the Blues have still never found a genuinely popular antidote.
I thought the point was that @magicalkittycat was saying "the Republicans don't actually care about trans; they only pretend to so they can distract the Democrats from talking about the economy", and @Primaprimaprima countered that if the Democrats believed that they could simply stop caring about trans so that the Republicans' cynical attacks would lose their raison d'etre. So I was arguing that the Republicans' attacks could still, in principle, be opportunistic and insincere even if the Democrats' support is sincere and immutable.
(I will stress again that I don't think this model is true; I believe most Republicans are in fact sincere in their opposition to trans, not opportunistic. I was only disputing the faulty epistemology of "if the Democrats genuinely believed the Republicans were being opportunistically insincere, we should expect to see them giving up on trans; therefore, if they don't give up on trans, they must not really believe the Republicans are faking their opposition" as a bit of reasoning.)
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