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Musk Is Bringing Back One of Trump’s Most Devastatingly Effective 2024 Campaign Attacks

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Elon Musk’s America PAC just dropped a wave of ads into four of the tightest Senate races on the map, and the theme is the one Democrats have spent two years praying the country would forget: men in women’s sports, and a party that still can’t bring itself to say plainly that this is insane.

The targets, per Axios, are Sherrod Brown in Ohio, Josh Turek in Iowa, James Talarico in Texas, and Mary Peltola in Alaska. The buy is digital and streaming — phones, tablets, the shows people actually watch — and it’s backed by a war chest that reportedly runs as high as $100 million for the cycle.

Cue the usual chorus from the consultant class: voters don’t care about this, the polls say affordability and Iran are what matter, this is a distraction.

Fine. Every word of that can be true and it still doesn’t touch what Musk is doing, because these ads are not persuasion. Nobody at America PAC is trying to talk a Talarico voter into becoming a Republican. This is a turnout operation wearing a television ad’s clothing.

That distinction is the whole ballgame, and it’s the thing establishment strategists in both parties keep failing to internalize. Midterms are not decided by the marginal undecided moderate agonizing over the Wall Street Journal editorial page. They are decided by which side’s occasional voters can be bothered. Millions of Americans who pulled the lever for Trump in 2024 will look at a November ballot with no Trump on it and find something better to do with their Tuesday. Those are the people this money is chasing. You don’t reach them with a chart about the CPI. You reach them with something that produces an immediate, visceral, ‘oh, hell no’:

Here’s the Musk ad:

The 2024 campaign proved the point at scale. The most effective ad of that entire cycle wasn’t about groceries or the border. It was footage of Kamala Harris talking about taxpayer-funded gender surgery for prison inmates, capped with a line that did more damage than a hundred million dollars of conventional messaging: “Kamala is for they/them. President Trump is for you.” Eleven words. It worked because it wasn’t really about policy at all. It was about *whose side are you on*, and it forced Democrats to answer a question they’d built their entire coalition around never having to answer.

Musk is betting that lightning strikes twice, and the bet is smarter than his critics want to admit. The ads are the loud part of a much larger machine — the PAC has also promised direct mail and door-knocking aimed squarely at conservatives with spotty midterm voting histories. Ads create the emotional spark; the ground game converts it into a ballot. That’s the correct sequence, and it’s more than the RNC managed in most cycles this century. Call it what it is: an attempt to put Trump on the ballot in a year when Trump isn’t on the ballot.

Democrats will keep insisting the issue polls badly as a priority. They’re right and it’s irrelevant. Priority polling measures what voters think is most important. Turnout is driven by what voters find intolerable. Those are different instruments measuring different things, and a party that can’t tell them apart is going to keep getting surprised on election night.

Two honest cautions, because conservatives should be clear-eyed about their own tactics.

First, a mobilization strategy has a ceiling. It banks votes you already own; it doesn’t win over the suburban voter who thinks the left has gone too far on this but also can’t afford her mortgage. If the culture message crowds out an economic one, Republicans will run up the score in places they were already going to win and lose the seats that decide the Senate.

Second, a strategy this dependent on one billionaire’s checkbook and one billionaire’s attention span is a strategy with a single point of failure. Musk’s enthusiasm for Republican politics has been, let’s say, weather-dependent. Building a permanent turnout infrastructure that survives his next mood swing would be worth rather more than $100 million.

But those are quibbles about execution, not direction. The direction is right. Democrats spent four years insisting this issue was a right-wing invention, then watched it help cost them the presidency, and their answer in 2026 is to hope nobody brings it up again.

Somebody just brought it up again. In four states. With nine figures behind it.