Tim Walz has also faced a ton of misinformation about his legislative record on transgender rights (File).
Washington:
A fierce attack on Tim Walz, fueled by misinformation about his support for the LGBTQ community, has failed to dent the US vice presidential nominee’s soaring approval ratings, suggesting voters are growing weary of some of the “culture war” issues amid a fierce race for the White House.
As the political campaign rages on ahead of the Nov. 5 election, Donald Trump and top Republicans have doubled down on the move, including falsely claiming that Walz signed legislation to protect pedophiles.
Walz, a popular two-term governor of Minnesota, has also faced a torrent of misinformation about his legislative record on transgender rights and gender-affirming care.
President Trump recently accused Waltz of being “deeply involved in the transgender world.”
Trump’s supporters have mocked him as “Tampon Tim,” falsely claiming that he forced schools to stock tampons and pads in boys’ bathrooms after he signed a law requiring schools to provide them free to students who are menstruating.
But unlike issues like abortion, which have driven voters to the polls at the local, state and national levels since the Supreme Court overturned the right to an abortion in 2022, these attacks did not appear to have any impact on Walz.
“People are starting to get issue fatigue when it comes to the culture wars,” Todd Belt, director of the political management program at George Washington University, told AFP.
“As we approach an election, people want to hear about everyday issues that have a real impact on their well-being.”
“The real problem”
“Inflation is the most important issue facing Americans,” said a mid-August poll by The Economist/YouGov, with 26% expressing concern about prices.
When asked about other issues that are “important” to Americans, jobs and the economy, immigration, health care and climate change were the top responses.
Abortion, which many Americans consider a key culture war issue, ranked sixth on the list.
“Voters want politicians to focus on the real issues facing our country, like inflation, abortion rights and climate change,” said GLAAD President Sarah Kate Ellis.
Her statement came following a March study that concluded that campaigning on anti-transgender issues was a “losing battle” and that candidates who frequently discussed the issue generated more opposition than support for their campaigns.
That hasn’t stopped Republicans and Democrats from making the culture wars a central part of their campaigns, and issues other than abortion could be the breakthroughs in a volatile election cycle.
But for now, despite criticism of his pro-LGBTQ record, Walz is leading Republican vice presidential nominee J.D. Vance in national polls by a large margin.
“People are tired”
AFP fact checkers say many of the accusations against Governor Walz relate to children, with claims circulating on social media that he signed a bill last year to protect pedophiles in Minnesota.
The false claim, which has been viewed tens of thousands of times on sites like Instagram, plays into a long-standing disinformation trope that links the LGBTQ community to pedophilia.
Lawmakers removed references to pedophilia from the state’s civil rights code, but experts including University of Virginia professor Naomi Kahn said the move would not affect “criminal laws regarding sexual contact with children.”
Other posts falsely accuse Governor Walz of allowing the state to revoke parental rights if a transgender child is prevented by their parents from receiving gender-affirming care.
“Tim Walz signed a bill that allows states to take away your children in the name of ‘gender-affirming care,'” conservative talk show host Megyn Kelly wrote on Platform X, a false post that has been viewed more than 2.5 million times and shared widely among Trump supporters.
Governor Walz has been fighting this misinformation since signing the Transgender Refuge Bill last year, giving legal protections to transgender people who come to Minnesota seeking medical care, even if the treatment is illegal in their home states.
Republican officials such as Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin have achieved electoral success in past elections by stoking anti-LGBTQ rhetoric.
But polls have shown that, unlike abortion-rights Democrats, Republicans have had little success mobilizing voters on anti-transgender issues in the 2022 midterm elections.
“It hasn’t worked so far” ahead of the November election, Belt said, adding that “people are tired of the message.”
“You can’t win an election just by being against something.”
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)
