Mother Jones illustration; Getty
At a fundraiser in early January, Nevada Gov. Joe Lombardo outright admitted to donors that he wasn’t the most inspiring candidate. “I am not enough of a motor—uh, a motivator—as a governor candidate to get them off the couch,” the Republican said on a recording obtained by the Nevada Independent.
“We have a couple ballot initiatives we’re going to initiate in order to get voters out,” Nevada Gov. Joe Lombardo told the room.
But the governor had a plan to fix it. “We have a couple ballot initiatives we’re going to initiate in order to get voters out,” he told the room. One measure would mandate photos IDs at the polls, a policy that targets racial minorities. The other initiative would tap into a newer but no less virulent strain of right-wing grievance: “The second thing we’re going to do is this thing called Men in Women’s Sports,” Lombardo said at another event last October, referring to a Nevada constitutional amendment he proposed earlier this year that would ban trans girls and women from playing on girls’ school sports teams.
“Yay!” a few listeners responded. “Yeah!”
“That’s going to get people out to vote,” Lombardo continued, “because, just from the groans in the room, I think they’re going to support it.”
After years of well-funded attacks on transgender people’s rights and dignity by conservative activists and GOP politicians, it’s no news that a Republican official is trying to win votes for the upcoming midterm elections by championing a policy targeting trans teenagers. Voters still largely endorse equal treatment and nondiscrimination for people whose gender identity doesn’t match their birth sex, but they also tend to rank trans rights at the bottom of their priority lists. Meanwhile, public opinion has shifted rightward on a carefully selected set of trans-related wedge issues, from trans girls’ inclusion in girls’ school sports to specialized pediatric healthcare treatments.
Now, Republicans like Lombardo are banking on the attitudes their party has spent years cultivating, putting these pet issues directly to voters in the form of ballot initiatives. Six transgender-related measures have been approved for the ballot so far in Colorado, Maine, Missouri, and Washington. Others are in the works in Nebraska and Arizona, in addition to Nevada.
“This is absolutely being used as ballot candy.”
And while Lombardo might be the only one to say the quiet part out loud, several of the measures look like they could have been designed to drive Republican results in competitive midterm races. “This is absolutely being used as ballot candy,” Quentin Savwoir, director of programs and strategy at the left-leaning Ballot Initiative Strategy Center, said at a recent press briefing.
Take, for instance, Missouri, where Republican state officials fought tooth and nail to stop a 2024 constitutional amendment to guarantee the right to an abortion prior to fetal viability, which is roughly 24 weeks. Despite their efforts, the measure made it to the ballot and won with a narrow 51.6 percent of the vote, overturning the state’s total abortion ban. In response, this year, state Republican lawmakers proposed their own constitutional amendment. It would make providing abortion illegal again in virtually all cases. And it would touch an entirely different issue as well: It would ban doctors from providing puberty blockers and hormone therapy to treat kids with gender dysphoria.
Trans youth healthcare is already illegal in Missouri under a law that expires in 2027. But lumping that issue together with abortion appears to be making this year’s proposed constitutional amendment more popular with voters. A February survey by Saint Louis University and YouGov found that the initiative was polling 7 points ahead, with 12 percent of likely voters still undecided. Just 43 percent of respondents would outlaw abortion in early pregnancy. But two-thirds—including most of the undecideds—would prefer to ban gender transition treatments for minors. The inclusion of a gender-affirming care ban in the constitutional amendment “is going to be the key difference between what we saw, say, two years ago and now,” poll director and SLU political science professor Steven Rogers told St. Louis Public Radio.
Missouri isn’t the only state where voters are being asked to cement an already existing anti-trans law in their state constitution. A similar effort is underway in Nebraska, where last summer, the governor signed a law banning trans girls from playing on girls’ school sports teams.
Never mind that trans students were barely present in Nebraska school sports to begin with, with fewer than 10 participating in either girls’ or boys’ sports between 2015 and 2025, as NBC News reported. Despite the tiny scale of the issue and the existing ban, a group calling itself Fairness for Girls started gathering signatures in March to add a ban on trans girls playing girls’ sports to the Nebraska constitution. Republican state Sen. Kathleen Kauth, the original sponsor of the sports ban bill (as well as a host of other anti-trans legislation), told Nebraska Public Media that the constitutional amendment was necessary so future lawmakers couldn’t undo her handiwork. “One of the things we always worry about when we pass a law is that it can be unpassed,” she said.
Rainbow Parents of Nebraska, an LGBTQ advocacy group, called the proposed Fairness for Girls amendment “another distraction and an attempt to increase conservative voter turnout.”
Indeed, a look at Fairness for Girls’ campaign finance filings suggests that there may be deeper political forces at play. The group, formed March 9, has a war chest of $1.6 million, provided entirely by a dark money group called Restore the Good Life Inc., according to its March disclosure. While Restore the Good Life doesn’t have to disclose its funders, the Nebraska Examiner has examined potential links between the group and Sen. Pete Ricketts, the wealthy Republican former governor who now serves as the state’s junior US senator. Restore the Good Life was last active during the 2022 gubernatorial election to replace Ricketts, when it paid for an attack ad against an opponent of Ricketts’ preferred successor using one of Ricketts’ talking points, the Examiner reported. Its treasurer is a Ricketts political appointee who has served as his surrogate at at least one political event. Ricketts in 2022 denied personally contributing to the group; his campaign did not respond to a request for comment.
Perhaps coincidentally, Ricketts is running for reelection to the Senate this year—and facing a strong challenge from Dan Osborn, a former labor leader running as an independent. As of February, the two candidates were polling neck and neck, a feat for Osborn in a state President Donald Trump won by more than 20 points in the last election cycle. Ricketts, who has repeatedly pushed for a national trans sports ban, is supporting the initiative. Osborn’s campaign did not respond to questions about his stance on the measure.
To recap, someone is spending $1.6 million to duplicate a Nebraska law that would have affected 10 total Nebraskans in 10 years into the state constitution. And it just so happens they’re putting the question on the ballot alongside a close Senate contest involving a fabulously wealthy incumbent who has vocally opposed inclusive policies for trans athletes.
Similar dynamics appear at be at work in Maine, another state with massive spending on a trans sports ballot initiative during a high-stakes Senate election. The race between incumbent Republican Sen. Susan Collins and likely Democratic challenger Graham Platner could determine which party controls the US Senate.
At a White House governors meeting last year, Trump said the trans athlete issue would be the political downfall of Maine Gov. Janet Mills, who was another leading Democratic candidate for Collins’ seat until she suspended her campaign in late April.
At the meeting, Trump told Mills that he would withhold federal funding if Maine didn’t follow a trans sports ban he tried to impose via executive order.
“See you in court,” Mills told Trump from the other side of the room.
“I look forward to that, that should be a real easy one,” Trump shot back, before adding a thinly veiled threat: “And enjoy your life after, Governor, because I don’t think you’ll be in elected politics.”
As the Senate campaigns got underway, Republican megadonor Richard Uihlein—the billionaire owner of business supply company Uline—started pouring money into a Maine ballot initiative that would not only require public schools to sort athletes onto sports teams according to the sex on their original birth certificates, but it would also restrict access to school bathrooms and locker rooms by birth certificate. As of January, Uihlein had given $800,000 to the committee pushing the initiative and was its sole funder. Maine’s lawmakers declined to vote on the measure this spring, which means it will be sent to voters in November. Leyland Streiff, principal officer of the committee behind the ballot initiative, Protect Girls’ Sports in Maine, said in a statement that the group would have preferred for the Democratic-majority legislature to enact its bill rather than sending it to voters. “Our initiative reflects the will of the people, not the will of one political party,” Streiff wrote, arguing that the measure was needed to prevent “males invading female private spaces.”
As of last year, there were just three trans girls playing girls’ high school sports in Maine.
But opponents of the Maine measure have argued that the issue is being blown out of proportion in service of a larger agenda. A lawsuit filed by the Trump administration against the state Education Department last year identified just three trans girls playing girls’ high school sports in the state. “We really want Mainers to understand that this is not about sports, it’s about a national extremist attempt to take over Maine politics and drive the conversation in November,” Destie Hohman Sprague, executive director of the Maine Women’s Lobby, told the Beacon.
It’s already driving the conversation, though it remains to be seen whether it will make a dent in voters’ behavior in November. The candidates have weighed in: Collins personally signed the petition to put the measure on the ballot. Platner, on the other hand, called the controversy over trans athletes an “invented culture war scare” on a Slate podcast episode in March.
Then he put a finer point on it. Maine’s ballot initiative “is funded by an out-of-state billionaire to make sure that we have this discussion,” Platner said, “and we don’t talk about raising his taxes.”
