“Woke” has been one of the top Republican refrains of recent months and even years, with Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis in particular turning to it whenever he feels the need to score a point. So it was shocking when the word was used only once in the first Republican presidential debate, and not once by DeSantis.
“There’s a lot of crazy woke things happening in schools,” former U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley said more than 90 minutes into the debate, a line dropped into the middle of an answer that touched on reading remediation before focusing on an attack on trans athletes. And unless it went unheard in the crosstalk and shouting at some other point, that was it. From catchphrase to dead and buried in record time.
Maybe the candidates finally noticed that this line was not polling well even among Republicans and realized they needed something new. They didn’t really come up with anything new, offering up one tired, nasty attack after another on trans kids who just want to go to the bathroom and play sports. They constantly pivoted away from the questions asked to rail against China, migrants at the southern border, and teachers’ unions. But they did seem to move on from the old refrain.
Asked about education, DeSantis delivered a favorite line: “We need education, not indoctrination.” Usually that would feed into a brag about his crusade against “woke ideology” in schools, but not at this debate.
This came after DeSantis had made anti-wokeness a personal brand when he signed the “Stop W.O.K.E. Act” (Stop Wrongs to Our Kids and Employees) in April 2022. The law bans teaching critical race theory (translation: anything about race that right-wing white people don’t like), and hiring of “woke CRT consultants.” And DeSantis could not, would not, shut up about wokeness, a word that he used to mean anything he didn’t like.
“We will never surrender to the woke mob. Florida is where woke goes to die,” he said in his inaugural address in January—but apparently his first presidential debate was where woke-the-talking-point went to die.
DeSantis had a notably flat debate performance, fading from the action for long stretches, evading straightforward questions, and often seeming like his heart wasn’t in it when he was talking. You’d think a line like “we’re going to use force and we’re going to leave them stone-cold dead” would be delivered with some fire, but not from DeSantis on Wednesday night. Who knows–maybe he was so busy reminding himself not to say “woke” that he was distracted from the things he was supposed to say. Maybe he felt deflated by not getting to bust out his personal mantra. Or maybe the knowledge that attacks on “woke” were falling flat was wrapped up in the knowledge that his entire campaign is falling flat.
Maybe Republicans will resurrect “woke,” or habit will assert itself and the term will keep slipping out, but at the debate it was notable that this centerpiece of the Republican primary was almost entirely missing.
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Everyone always talks about redistricting, but what is it like to actually do it? Oregon political consultant Kari Chisholm joins us on this week's episode of The Downballot to discuss his experience as member of Portland's new Independent District Commission, a panel of citizens tasked with creating the city's first-ever map for its city council. Kari explains why Portland wanted to switch from at-large elections to a district-based system; how new multi-member districts could boost diversity on the council; and the commission's surprisingly effective efforts to divide the city into four equal districts while heeding community input.