When you awoke

Ron DeSantis’s campaign strategy, which seems primarily based on using the word “woke” as often as possible, is failing because most Republican voters are as tired of hearing about it as I am:

Gov. Ron DeSantis last year used the word five times in 19 seconds, substituting “woke” for Nazis as he cribbed from Winston Churchill’s famous vow to battle a threatened German invasion in 1940. Nikki Haley, the former South Carolina governor, speaks of a “woke self-loathing” that has swept the nation. Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina found himself backpedaling furiously after declaring that “‘woke supremacy’ is as bad as white supremacy.”

The term has become a quick way for candidates to flash their conservative credentials, but battling “woke” may have less political potency than they think. Though conservative voters might be irked at modern liberalism, successive New York Times/Siena College polls of Republican voters nationally and then in Iowa found that candidates were unlikely to win votes by narrowly focusing on rooting out left-wing ideology in schools, media, culture and business.

Instead, Republican voters are showing a “hands off” libertarian streak in economics, and a clear preference for messages about “law and order” in the nation’s cities and at its borders.

The findings hint why Mr. DeSantis, who has made his battles with “woke” schools and corporations central to his campaign, is struggling and again show off Mr. Trump’s keen understanding of part of the Republican electorate. Campaigning in Iowa in June, Mr. Trump was blunt: “I don’t like the term ‘woke,’” he said, adding, “It’s just a term they use — half the people can’t even define it, they don’t know what it is.”

It was clearly a jab at Mr. DeSantis, but the Times’s polls suggest Mr. Trump may be right. Social issues like gay rights and once-obscure jargon like “woke” may not be having the effect many Republicans had hoped.

Trump has many unique weaknesses as a candidate, but he also has unique strengths and “knowing what the Republican base, as opposed to Republican pseudo-intellectuals whose anonymous Stormfront accounts are about to be revealed, want to hear” is one strength he has that his nominal opponents for the Republican nomination don’t.

Maybe he's in a dead heat with Ramaswamy because you have to listen to 5 hours of Joe Rogan just to know what the hell he's campaigning on.— Now on Threads! (@agraybee) July 21, 2023