As her race against Republican challenger Eric Hovde tightens, with Cook Political Report projecting a toss-up in November, U.S. Sen. Tammy Baldwin (D-Wis.) is fielding attacks over her support for LGBTQ rights.

Two recent ads run by the Senate Leadership Fund, a superPAC that works to elect Republicans to the chamber, take aim at her support for gender affirming care and an LGBTQ center in Wisconsin. Baldwin was the first openly LGBTQ candidate elected to the Senate.

The first ad concerns her statement of support for Wisconsin Gov. Tony Evers’s veto of a Republican-led bill to ban medically necessary healthcare interventions for transgender youth in the state.

Treatments require parental consent for patients younger than 18, and genital surgeries are not performed on minors in Wisconsin.

The second ad concerns funding that Baldwin had earmarked for Briarpatch Youth Services, an organization that provides crucial services for at-risk and homeless young people, with some programming for LGBTQ youth.

Baldwin’s victory is seen as key for Democrats to retain control of the Senate, a tall order that would require them to defend a handful of vulnerable incumbents. U.S. Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia, an Independent who usually votes with the Democrats, is retiring after this term and his replacement is expected to be the state’s Republican Gov. Jim Justice.

With just four weeks until Election Day, Donald Trump and Republican candidates in key down-ballot races have spent more than $65 million on anti-trans television ads since the start of August, The New York Times reported on Tuesday.

The move signals that Republicans believe attacking the vice president and other Democratic candidates over their support for trans rights will be an effective strategy along with exploiting their opponents’ perceived weaknesses on issues of immigration and inflation.

However, as Human Rights Campaign President Kelley Robinson told the Times, conservatives had tried using the transgender community as a cudgel to attack Democrats during the 2022 midterms and in the off-year elections in 2023. In most cases, they were unsuccessful.

The GOP’s decision to, nevertheless, revive anti-trans messaging in this election cycle “shows that Republicans are desperate right now,” she said. “Instead of articulating how they’re going to make the economy better or our schools safer, they’re focused on sowing fear and chaos.”

The Times said most Republican ads focus on issues where they believe their opponents are out of step with the views held by most Americans — for example, on access to taxpayer funded transition-related healthcare interventions for minors and incarcerated people.

At the same time, there is hardly a clear distinction between ads focusing on divisive policy disagreements and those designed to foment and exploit rank anti-trans bigotry.

For example, the Trump campaign’s most-aired ad about Harris in recent weeks targets her support for providing gender affirming care to inmates (per an interview in 2019, when she was attorney general of California, and a questionnaire from the ACLU that she completed in 2020 when running for president).

The ad “plays on anti-trans prejudices, inviting viewers to recoil from images of Ms. Harris alongside those of people who plainly do not conform to traditional gender norms, to try to portray Ms. Harris herself as out of the ordinary,” the Times wrote in an article last month analyzing the 30-second spot, which had run on television stations in Arizona, Georgia, North Carolina and Wisconsin.

During an interview on “The Howard Stern Show” Tuesday, Vice President Kamala Harris discussed her early support for same-sex marriage and warned of the threats to LGBTQ rights that are likely to come if she loses to Donald Trump in November.

Conservative U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas was explicit, she said, in calling for the court to revisit precedent-setting decisions including those that established the nationwide constitutional right to same-sex marriage.

“I actually was proud to perform some of the first same-sex marriages as an elected official in 2004,” Harris said, a time when Americans opposed marriage equality by a margin of 60 to 31 percent, according to a Pew survey.

“A lot of people have evolved since then,” the vice president said, “but here’s how I think about it: We actually had laws that were treating people based on their sexual orientation differently.”

She continued, “So, if you’re a gay couple, you can’t get married. We were basically saying that you are a second-class citizen under the law, not entitled to the same rights as a [straight] couple.”

During his presidency, Trump appointed three conservative justices to the Supreme Court who, in short order, voted to overturn the abortion protections that were in place since Roe v. Wade was decided in 1973.

“The court that Donald Trump created,” Harris said, is “now talking about what else could be at risk — and understand, if Donald Trump were to get another term, most of the legal scholars think that there’s going to be maybe even two more seats” that he could fill.

“That means, think about it, not for the next four years [but] for the next 40 years, for the next four generations of your family,” Americans would live under the rule of a conservative supermajority “that is about restricting your rights versus expanding your rights,” she said.