At a fundraiser in early January, Nevada Republican Gov. Joe Lombardo outright admitted to donors 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,” he 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,” Gov. Lombardo reassured 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 reassured 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,” the governor 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........

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