Status: 🔴 Director of the American Enterprise Institute who publicly described attacking trans kids as “a winning issue for Republicans”
Dan Cox is a director at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), the conservative public policy think tank. In March 2021, as state legislatures advanced a record wave of anti-trans bills, Cox told Axios that attacking trans children was a calculated political winner for the GOP.
In an interview with Axios cited by Them.us, Cox said attacking trans kids “seems to be a winning issue for Republicans, at least in the places where they’re fighting it most aggressively.”
“On the Democratic side, this is not an issue that really excites the base. But on the right, I think these issues are really, really salient, so it tends to fire up folks disproportionately on the right than the left.”
The remark came as at least 73 anti-trans bills were introduced in state legislatures in the first three months of 2021 — 65 targeting trans youth, 41 targeting trans student athletes — including the first sports bans ever signed into law in South Dakota and Mississippi.
Cox’s framing was echoed by conservative strategists including Penny Nance of Concerned Women for America, who called trans student athletics the “wedge issue that will bring suburban women back to the polls.”