Have Republican Voters Put the Idea of “Woke” to Bed?

The watchword of the 2024 Republican primary has arguably been “woke.” Namely, an opposition to it. Yet according to polling of GOP primary voters by The New York Times, attacks on wokeness may not be a winning formula.

In late 2021, Virginia Gov. Glenn Younkins won a surprise gubernatorial victory after running a campaign laser-focused on “critical race theory” being taught in the state’s public schools. Ever since, Republican politicians have thought they’d discovered a path to victory, one that would peel away some of the suburban voters that had one year prior delivered the presidency to Joe Biden. (Loudoun County, a wealthy Virginia suburb that went for Joe Biden in the presidential election, later became the epicenter of Younkins’ attacks on school curriculum and was instrumental in Republican Younkin’s upset win.)

Yet a series of Times/Siena polls found that just a quarter of national Republican voters preferred a candidate “who focuses on defeating radical ‘woke’ ideology in our schools, media, and culture” over one “who focuses on restoring law and order in our streets and at the border.” Nearly two-thirds of respondents opted for the law and order candidate. Those numbers were even starker for the 65-and-older crowd, who vote in high numbers. The Times’s findings were consistent for respondents in Iowa, where the first-in-the-nation primary will take place in mid-January.

Asked whether they’d prefer a candidate who vowed to fight “woke” corporations or a candidate who “says that the government should stay out of deciding what corporations should support,” 52 percent opted for the latter, and just 38 percent for the former. And more than half of national Republican voters said they care more about a candidate protecting individual freedom over one whose stated mission is to restore “traditional values.”

Biotech investor Vivek Ramaswamy, who currently sits in third place in Republican primary polls, began his political career with a book titled Woke, Inc.: Inside Corporate America’s Social Justice Scam. As late as May, he was calling wokeness “a cultural cancer.” Yet in an interview with The Times, Ramaswamy acknowledged that the polling results had shifted his focus. His campaign ditched stickers that read “Stop Wokeism. Vote Vivek” and replaced them with hats emblazoned with the word “Truth.”

“At the time I came to be focused on this issue, no one knew what the word was,” Ramaswamy told The Times of his former anti-“woke” agenda. “Now that they have caught up, the puck has moved. It’s in my rearview mirror as well.” (Vivek’s shift away from the term seems to be overstated: a day after speaking to The Times, Ramaswamy sent out a fundraising pitch titled “Wokeness killing the American Dream”.)

But the candidate who has made attacks on “wokeness” most central to his appeal is Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, who currently trails former president and Republican hopeful Donald Trump by nearly 40 points. “I totally reject, being in Iowa, New Hampshire, that people don’t think those are important,” DeSantis told The Times, referring to his anti-woke policies, which have included attacks on Disney, bans on gender-affirming care for youth, and attempts to yank the state’s education system to the right. “These families with children are thanking me for taking stands in Florida,” he said. And while some of DeSantis’s donors have called out his extreme stances, his super PAC’s largest donor, who on Friday said he’d no longer donate to DeSantis’s campaign due to the governor’s draconian abortion restriction, also said DeSantis was “spot on” in his attacks on “wokeism.”

In an obvious dig at DeSantis at a June campaign stop in Iowa, Trump said he didn’t like the term “woke,” adding, “It’s just a term they use—half the people can’t even define it, they don’t know what it is.” Asked about the poll results this week, a Trump campaign spokesman told the Times, “Americans want to return to a prosperous nation, and there’s only one person who can do that—President Trump.”