Politicians Are Supposed to Lead, Not Just Follow Polls

Rep. Sarah McBride's advice to Democrats on trans rights would have killed the Civil Rights Act.

Rep. Sarah McBride's recent interview with Ezra Klein for The New York Times should be required listening for anyone who wants to understand how Democrats managed to lose the public on trans rights so spectacularly. Not because McBride offers any brilliant insights into what went wrong, but because she perfectly embodies the spineless approach to politics that got us here in the first place.

In the 90-minute conversation, McBride — the first openly transgender member of Congress — spent most of her time lecturing trans “activists” and advocating for a politics of pure reactivity that would make any competent political strategist want to bang their head against a wall. But it was one particular exchange that really got under my skin, where McBride essentially argued that politicians should just do whatever's popular.

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"Public opinion is everything," McBride told Klein. "And if you want us to change, you need to help foster the change in public opinion before you're asking these elected officials to betray the fact that they are, at the end of the day, representatives who have to represent in some form or fashion the views of the people that they represent."

This is political malpractice dressed up as pragmatism, and it represents everything wrong with how Democrats have approached trans rights over the past few years.

Here's the thing: politicians aren't supposed to be weathervanes, spinning whichever way the wind blows. They're supposed to be leaders who shape public opinion, not prisoners to it. McBride's argument isn't just strategically bankrupt — it's morally cowardly.

Want to know what real political leadership looks like? Look at Lyndon Johnson and the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

When Johnson pushed the Civil Rights Act through Congress, public opinion was far from solidly behind him. Just two months after the law was signed, a Gallup poll found that while nearly 60% of Americans approved, nearly a third disapproved. That's hardly the overwhelming mandate McBride seems to think politicians need before acting.

More telling: by 1965, 45% of Americans thought the Johnson administration was moving "too fast" on integration, with only 14% saying it wasn't moving fast enough. If Johnson had followed McBride's advice and waited for public opinion to shift first, we might still be waiting for basic civil rights protections.

The civil rights protests that helped build momentum for the legislation were even more unpopular. In 1961, 57% of Americans said civil rights demonstrations hurt the cause of integration. By 1964, that number had grown to 74% who thought the protests were "detrimental to achieving racial equality."

But Johnson didn't throw up his hands and say, "Well, the polls look bad, so I guess we'll wait." Instead, he used his considerable political skills to build coalitions, lobby wavering senators, and push through transformative legislation despite fierce opposition. He understood that sometimes you have to lead public opinion, not follow it.

That's what real political courage looks like. And it's exactly what Democrats have failed to do on trans rights.

Instead of making the moral case for treating trans people with basic dignity and fighting to shift public opinion, Democrats went into full retreat mode the moment they faced political headwinds. Kamala Harris went deer-in-the-headlights when confronted with Trump's anti-trans attacks during the 2024 campaign, infamously demurring whenever asked about her prior pro-trans positions and simply responding that she would “follow the law” if she became president. She couldn't even bring herself to say that trans people should be allowed access to healthcare — the most basic position imaginable. Other Democratic candidates started throwing trans people under the bus to score political points. The party's relative silence created a vacuum that Republicans were all too happy to fill with their own messaging.

This isn't some abstract political science debate. There are real consequences when politicians abdicate their responsibility to lead. Trump's anti-trans policies are "stunningly wide-ranging" and "popular," as Klein noted in his interview with McBride. Republicans are plowing ahead with restrictions on trans people in sports, schools, the military, healthcare, and basic participation in public life because Democrats created space for them to do so through their cowardice.

McBride seems to understand this on some level. She acknowledged that Democrats became "absolutist" and moved too far ahead of public opinion, going to "Trans 201, Trans 301, when people were still at a very much Trans 101 stage." But her proposed solution — making politicians even more subservient to polling — would only make things worse.

The real problem isn't that advocates pushed too hard or that politicians took too many progressive positions. The problem is that when the going got tough, Democrats folded like a cheap suit instead of doing the hard work of persuasion and leadership that Johnson and others demonstrated during the civil rights era.

Politics isn't just about reflecting public opinion — it's about shaping it. That requires politicians who are willing to take principled stands even when they're unpopular, who can make the moral case for doing the right thing, and who understand that sometimes you have to fight for progress rather than just hoping it falls into your lap.

McBride's approach would have killed the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act, and every other piece of transformative legislation in American history. Great social movements don't succeed by polling their way to the lowest common denominator. They succeed by convincing people that change is not just necessary, but morally imperative.

The tragedy is that while McBride correctly identifies that Democrats lost the public on trans rights, she's learned completely the wrong lesson. Her solution — turning politicians into poll-reading robots — would ensure that progressives never win anything meaningful ever again.

What we need aren't politicians who follow public opinion. We need politicians who understand that leadership means having the courage to shape it — not representatives who mistake cowardice for strategy.