If you have watched a sporting event in the last month, you’ve probably been bombarded with Trump ads lambasting Kamala Harris for having endorsed free gender-transition surgery for prisoners and immigration detainees. The dead hand of her 2019 campaign continues to haunt her.

Next to her association with the deeply unpopular Biden presidency, the suite of left-wing stances Harris adopted in that ill-fated effort are still, five years later, the largest obstacles in the path of her presidency. What makes this all so maddening is that those obstacles were placed there by well-meaning progressives.

The Trump ad describes an answer Harris gave on an ACLU candidate questionnaire five years ago. (“As President will you use your executive authority to ensure that transgender and nonbinary people who rely on the state for medical care — including those in prison and immigration detention — will have access to comprehensive treatment associated with gender transition, including all necessary surgical care?” Answer: yes.). I’m sure neither the ACLU nor the Harris staffers who cooperated in this response set out to seed Republican attack ads. Yet a large portion of the work of the progressive nonprofit complex is functionally dedicated to this very outcome. And these kinds of perverse outcomes will continue to occur unless Democrats get wise to the dynamic that continues to produce them.

The progressive movement is largely composed of thematic issue groups, dedicated to a cause or causes, such as climate change, women’s rights, economic justice, and so on. All of these groups, naturally, see their own issue as having special importance. Accordingly, they generally understand their role as pushing the Democratic Party to the left on their issue of concern.

An organization dedicated to changing the world on Issue X isn’t going to raise much money or inspire its staff if it takes the posture that Issue X is politically dicey and that the prudent course for Democrats would be to trim their sails. It’s standard for activist groups to insist their specific cause is highly popular (or, if that stance is too implausible for Democrats to believe, at least not unpopular). Many of these organizations commission their own polling designed to affirm that the American people share their priorities. Unlike straightforward election polling, which asks which candidate you intend to vote for, issue polling is extremely sensitive to small changes in wording, which makes it very easy to produce results that support whatever outcome the group funding the poll desires.

There’s no public polling on taxpayer-financed transition surgery for prisoners, but polling generally finds the public is broadly supportive of equal rights for trans people. That support does not quite extend to allowing trans athletes to compete in women’s sports, or........

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