Harris Loss Has Democrats Fighting Over How to Talk About Transgender Rights

In the weeks before Election Day, aides to Kamala Harris could see in campaign polling that Donald J. Trump’s attacks on Ms. Harris’s support for transgender rights were driving away swing voters.

Struggling to put together a rebuttal, they produced a series of ads arguing that Mr. Trump was trying to distract from more important issues. Some of the spots noted that the policy Mr. Trump was seizing on, taxpayer-funded gender-transition surgery for inmates, was in place when he was president.

But none of the messages significantly swayed voters when the ads were tested with focus groups, according to four former Harris campaign aides who spoke on the condition of anonymity.

After a sharp, internal debate, the campaign shelved the ads. Instead, it settled on an anodyne television spot that showed the vice president condemning “negative ads” without mentioning Mr. Trump’s transgender attacks.

Since Ms. Harris’s defeat, her campaign’s decision has landed in the center of a contentious debate over how large a role transgender issues played in her party’s losses around the country. Several prominent Democrats said Ms. Harris’s relative silence was a damaging concession to Mr. Trump — and evidence that the campaign was so out of step with Americans’ views that it did not appreciate the potency of the ads.

“Malpractice was committed by that campaign,” said Ed Rendell, a Democratic former governor of Pennsylvania and former chairman of the Democratic National Committee. Mr. Rendell said he was so alarmed by the Trump attacks that he called top Harris campaign advisers, pleading for them to respond directly.