1 Word Has Been Pivotal In DeSantis’ Campaign — But GOP Voters Are ‘Meh’ On It
As GOP voters seem increasingly “meh” on culture war rhetoric, it’s bad news for the politician who has most publicly positioned himself as an anti-woke warrior.
Ron DeSantis Went Down With The Anti-Woke Ship
As GOP voters seem increasingly “meh” on culture war rhetoric, it’s bad news for the politician who has most publicly positioned himself as an anti-woke warrior.
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“Florida is where woke goes to die,” Gov. Ron DeSantis declared at a victory speech in November 2022, just after winning his second term as governor of Florida. He’d just had a decisive win in an election that wasn’t otherwise particularly good for Republicans across the country, and he’d done it by promoting himself as an anti-woke warrior.
It wasn’t his official presidential campaign announcement, but it was still a pitch to voters nationwide: I’m the candidate who can defeat the creeping specter of wokeness infecting schools, workplaces, and our culture as a whole.
But one year after that victory speech that unofficially anointed him as a formidable opponent to Donald Trump, he’s polling in a far distant second place to the former president, and he’s been unable to take his anti-woke message nationwide. What happened?
Is DeSantis a bad messenger, is his anti-wokeness message just not resonating with GOP voters — or is the grip Trump has on the Republican electorate just too strong?
“It’s a little bit of all the above,” Alex Conant, a GOP consultant for Firehouse Strategies, a public affairs firm, told HuffPost.
Originally, “woke” was a term in African American Vernacular English meaning to stay alert to racial discrimination. But soon after the racial justice protests swept the country in the wake of the murder of George Floyd, conservative pundits co-opted the term to derogatorily refer to anything related to progressivism, equality or diversity.
Companies that put out statements in support of diversity initiatives or changed their racist logos, educators who wanted to teach accurate U.S. history, and celebrities who spoke out against discrimination were swiftly deemed “woke” ― and something conservatives everywhere should fear.
In contrast, in Florida and across the country, being anti-woke meant introducing bills that target LGBTQ+ students, diversity initiatives in the workplace, and what books children had access to at school. Any candidate promising to bring those ideas to the national stage, the thinking went, would be a strong Republican contender for the White House.
And perhaps no public figure has invested as much in the concept, or hitched their wagon to it as publicly as DeSantis.
“The woke mind virus is basically a form of cultural Marxism. At the end of the day, it’s an attack on the truth,” DeSantis said during a Fox News interview shortly after announcing he was running for president. “And because it’s a war on truth, I think we have no choice but to wage a war on woke.”
The following week he went to Iowa and promised to take on wokeness as president. “We will fight the woke in education, we will fight the woke in corporations, we will fight the woke in the halls of Congress,” he said.
But complaining about wokeness and stoking the culture wars has turned out to be a losing bet in elections across the country.
In the November 2022 election, candidates that focused on culture wars failed to win key races across the country, with losses in Pennsylvania, Michigan and Georgia. Then last month, school board candidates who ran on combating wokeness in schools were unsuccessful.
It’s looking increasingly clear that Republicans overestimated how much GOP voters were invested in fighting wokeness. With just weeks to go before the first ballots are cast, a November poll out of Iowa shows that DeSantis is tied for second place with former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley, at just 16%.
Trump seemed to pick up on the weakness of anti-wokeness branding before DeSantis. “I don’t like the term ‘woke’ because I hear, ‘Woke, woke, woke.’ It’s just a term they use, half the people can’t even define it, they don’t know what it is,” he said at an Iowa event in June.
Conant says Trump is correct. “A lot of voters don’t know what woke is,” he said. “Republicans struggle to define it.”
“Fundamentally, a lot of Republicans are troubled by activist politicians on the right and the left, and they don’t want to see the government penalizing companies,” Conant said.
“The woke mind virus is basically a form of cultural Marxism. At the end of the day, it’s an attack on the truth,” Ron DeSantis said. “And because it’s a war on truth, I think we have no choice but to wage a war on woke.”
ILLUSTRATION: JIANAN LIU/HUFFPOST; PHOTO: GETTY IMAGES
