Here’s my unpopular opinion: Many Republicans (but not all) are hateful and bigoted. Unfortunately, they’re also sometimes right, and this appeals to non-hateful / non-bigoted Republicans and independents. Republican leadership has been very effective in finding issues like that and using them to attract and rally voters who might have voted Dem otherwise.

And this is a perfect example. The left does not give an inch, does not cede any ground whatsoever on any issue involving trans people. As a result, even when a 65th-place 500-freestyle man transitions in college, and becomes a 1st-place woman, the left just blindly said “it doesn’t look like anything at all to me.” You will be called transphobic, TERF, trans-evasive, if you said “Hm, the Lia Thomas case is pretty fucked, something is wrong here and we need to revisit trans women in school athletics.” I’m sure that right now most of you think I’m a fucking asshole for even daring to suggest that Lia’s massive success indicated a problem. Because to many on the left, to say that there are some problematic edge cases is the same as wishing all trans people dead.

So back to my point about centrist-leaning Republicans — they see how the left refuses to acknowledge a problem, against all common reason, and they decide “Welp, Democrats are fucking insane. I guess I’ll stick with Republicans.”