Last month, Marcy Kaptur, the longest-serving woman in congressional history, released a video advertisement in which she looks directly at the camera and says exactly what she thinks about one of the most divisive issues facing Democrats today. This was reported by Qazaqyia.kz citing The Guardian.
"Here's the truth: I voted with Republicans to keep transgender ideology out of our schools because parents know what's best for their kids," Kaptur says, "and boys should not play in girls' sports."
In the days that followed, two county Democratic parties in her north-west Ohio district called for Kaptur to take down the ad, the president of the largest LGBTQ+ rights group in the country told reporters it would not back her re-election campaign, and a former intern published an op-ed about how he was "embarrassed" to have worked for the congresswoman.
For Kaptur, taking a stance at odds with much of her party may be a necessity as she navigates what could be the toughest re-election campaign she has ever faced, in a year where Democrats nationwide believe they are poised to win back the US House of Representatives and halt Donald Trump's legislative agenda.
In office since Ronald Reagan was in his first term as president, Kaptur easily won re-election for decades, until redistricting following the 2020 census increased the share of Republican voters in her area. She eked out a 22nd term against Republican challenger Derek Merrin in the 2024 presidential year, even as Trump won her district handily. Months later, the Ohio redistricting commission approved a legally mandated redraw of the state's congressional map that shifted her district about four percentage points further to the right.
Kaptur and Merrin are set for a rematch in the 3 November midterm election, and forecasters believe it could go either way, despite Republican candidates nationwide facing headwinds in the form of Trump's public unpopularity and persistently high gas prices.
In an interview, Kaptur said she felt it was important that voters knew precisely where she stood on the question of transgender rights, two years after Trump's re-election campaign successfully weaponized the question against his Democratic opponent Kamala Harris. She also viewed it as inevitable that Merrin's campaign would try to use the issue against her.
"We knew what he was going to do, and they have done that to us in the past," she said.
Kaptur is not the only Democrat facing a tough race this year to come out against equal access for transgender youth athletes, who have been targeted by a wave of bans in Republican-controlled states, including Ohio. In a ruling earlier this year, the US supreme court's conservative supermajority upheld such laws.
The Democratic gubernatorial candidate in Ohio, Amy Acton, opposes transgender participation in school sports, as does Rob Sand, the party's nominee for governor of Iowa. This week, Annie Andrews, the Democratic Senate candidate in South Carolina released an ad saying she, too, supports the bans, while in May, eight Democrats in the US House – Kaptur included – broke with their party to vote for a bill that would require public schools receive parental consent before recognizing students as transgender. Some of the Democrats who supported that measure, which has not cleared the Senate, have been targeted by the mid-decade redistricting effort Trump encouraged Republicans to carry out, in hopes of stopping Democrats from taking the House this year.
Kaptur has had a rebellious streak for much of her 43 years in Congress, which began when she unseated a Republican in 1982 after serving as a domestic policy adviser in Jimmy Carter's administration.
Representing a district centered on her hometown of Toledo that was navigating the fallout from manufacturing disinvestment and population loss, Kaptur opposed both the North American Free Trade Agreement and the bank bailouts of the 2008 financial crisis. She has made unsuccessful bids for leadership positions in the House Democratic Caucus, and complained openly that midwestern representatives like herself were being overlooked. In 1996, the late billionaire Ross Perot approached her to serve as his running mate when he made a third-party bid for the presidency, but Kaptur declined.
Now 80, Kaptur still lives in her childhood home, and has no plans to retire, saying that since she is the top Democrat on a powerful, spending-focused House subcommittee, she feels a responsibility to use that leverage to help her community. "My ability to help them is a function of the positions I hold," she said of her constituents.
Though her job requires her presence in Washington many weeks, Kaptur may be the best known local politician in Toledo, simply because she manages to be around quite a bit.
"Marcy's here. I was just at an event, and I know it's campaign time, but I was just at an event with her Saturday," said Tony Totty, the president of the United Auto Workers's political arm in the Toledo region.
"That's not just because it's campaign time. Marcy is in her district, and, you know, these politicians fall in love with DC because it's alluring, but Marcy's been there too long to let that sway her."
Her career has coincided with a decline in Democrats' fortunes in Ohio, a one-time swing state that's now dominated by Republicans. As Kaptur's re-election prospects have grown more competitive, she has repeatedly been among the first to publicly break with her party.
"Joe Biden's letting Ohio solar manufacturers be undercut by China, but Marcy Kaptur's fighting back," the narrator de