“Woke 1 was crazy”

0:01Voters in Wisconsin threw cold water on hot socialist summer this week. They chose a centrist moderate Democrat over Francesca Hong, a DSA candidate whose campaign prompted both real excitement and also laughter, eye rolling and some outrage when old statements were drug up like the one where she seemed a little uncomfortable with her half white son. My proximity to whiteness continues, right? My son is biracial. He's half white and half Korean. And I think navigating, you know, what his identity is and how people perceive him is always at the back of my mind as well. This reminded people of a time in which many Democrats arguably just did too much, sometimes in kente cloth.

0:41AOC seemed to acknowledge that on ABC's This Week. I have a local city councilman that has this saying, woke one was crazy. But is saying it enough or will bad tweets and takes continue to haunt Democrats? We're going to ask coming up on Today Explained from Vox.

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2:16My favorite holiday is... Today explained. I don't want to cancel it. I actually love it. Dave Weigel is a national political reporter at Semaphore. I talked to him on Wednesday morning after the results in Wisconsin had come in. He's been covering this primary season and some of the surprising wins by insurgent left candidates. Your DSAs, you are endorsed by the DSAs. In Wisconsin, that group was supposed to get another big win with Francesca Hong, and then they didn't. Dave, what happened? Wisconsin's primary was, I don't like to use hyperbole, but one of the most dramatic elections I've covered in person.

2:57It was a crowded primary. Lieutenant Governor to two-term Governor Tony Evers was running. She wasn't getting a lot of momentum. She made a bunch of big mistakes. And Francesca Hong, a state legislator from Madison, the most left-wing candidate in the field, built a very strong campaign that kept rising. A new candidate is jumping into the Wisconsin governor's race. Democrat Francesca Hong launched her campaign today. Democratic Socialist Assemblywoman Francesca Hong is now leading the polls in the state's Democratic primary for governor. Most Democrats in Wisconsin thought, OK, well, we'll sort this out later.

3:33We'll see who the alternatives are. The lieutenant governor collapsed because her campaign manager turned out to be faking her finances. as Governor Evers pulled in David Crowley, the Milwaukee County executive who had been running for governor, and dropped out, and he pulled him back into the race. It's a shakeup in the Wisconsin governor's race. David Crowley is back in. And Evers just declared to voters, Democratic voters, I believe that this guy, who has not been my lieutenant governor, unlike someone else who's in the race, is uniquely qualified to take my place. He's easily the best candidate, and looking forward to turning the state of Wisconsin over to him.

4:14He will be an outstanding, outstanding governor. And as he campaigned around the state with Crowley, he started to say, Hong cannot win. I'm worried that Hong cannot win. She has spent her entire campaign dealing with, not with the issues, but what's on the Twitter. So Crowley went from and also ran when he was first in the race to polling about 20 points behind Hong to winning. Today, I stand before you filled with gratitude, with humility and hope as I formally accept the Democratic nomination to be the next governor of the great state of Wisconsin. And winning with a very high turnout.

5:02so crowley wins francesca hong loses the other headline of the day you could use either headline they both work um did she lose because she wanted to cancel thanksgiving tell us about her yes so she's a member of democratic socialists of america her premise was that the state was ready for radical change and democrats are a little bit divided on the path forward obviously based on the results. Do we need somebody in the Evers mold, but with a chance to actually get a governing trifecta? Or do we need a socialist who is going to restructure the state's tax system, and it's very important to her campaign, put a moratorium on data centers?

5:44These were popular positions when she sent them on the trail. And it's not a campaign. I think this did work for her. She campaigned in jumpsuits. She wore a bandana in her hair very much to look like Rosie the Riveter. She was a restaurateur chef in Madison. I actually went to her restaurant when it was open. And her message was, there is a working class majority that I'm going to capture. But you mentioned the Thanksgiving thing. Yes, she was very left wing. That was her. Cancel Thanksgiving. Should have done this in 1621. If it takes a worldwide pandemic for us to realize we should stop celebrating colonialism in the original super spreader event that killed indigenous folks and women.

6:23So be it. She, not just in 2020, but on social media for years, just expressed very left-wing opinions. Police exist to uphold white supremacy, defund, then abolish. Reform can't be an option. If you were living in Madison in 2020, be weird if you didn't say that. That was the majority opinion for the community she represented. like the Isthmus of Madison, one of the most left-wing places in the country. And when she ran for governor, yes, those became problems for her. And there was kind of a bank shot campaign by Democrats, which was there are a lot of Democrats who agree with her sentiment and are tired of being told we need to nominate somebody more centrist than you to be governor.

7:06But Wisconsin Democrats have had this experience for a decade plus trying to win back control, knowing that the state's 50-50 in presidential elections recently. Hong's argument was, we can dramatically change this, and just with a populist campaign, we can reshape the electorate. And most Democrats were skeptical. They just could not envision somebody with her left-wing cultural views selling to their white neighbor who thought the Democrats were too left-wing already. And so they did, yes. The Democrats had the choice to nominate the most left-wing candidate possible, and they decided it was too risky.

7:44Which, you know, brings our attention to the narrative this season, which is it is centrist Democrats versus progressive Democrats, Democratic Socialists in some cases. And there have been quite a few primary elections this week. Where else have we seen this dynamic play out? And what is it actually telling us? You could come away from last night in Wisconsin and say, okay, the Socialists are over. Too soon? Are socialists over in Madison? They're not. Hong did extremely well in the city of Madison. In safely democratic places, the discourse is still, if we're electing Democrats anyway, why not have the most progressive Democrats possible?

8:23Why put up with corporate Democrats? This is a pretty popular pejorative for the centrist wing of the party. So in New York City, where DSA had its biggest breakthroughs this year, after its big breakthroughs with Zora Mo Adani last year, yes, socialists who want to work with the mayor to be the most left-wing candidates possible, that's popular. And running against them based on their Israel position, unpopular, because most of the Democratic bases, even those places, is tired of sending money to Israel, tired of funding Israel's wars. in Denver. It worked too. But then you get into these swing states and the conversation is different.

9:00And if you're in Wisconsin, you're a regular voter in Wisconsin, you have lived through the Scott Walker era. You've lived through Republicans trying to make Democrats completely irrelevant by gerrymandering the state. You've lived through this comeback where every year there are off-cycle Supreme Court elections where Democrats went from a minority on the state Supreme Court to winning it. And the goal of all this is just setting the party up to get a governing trifecta and do big things this year. That was more important to them than the ideological fight for what kind of governor there would be.

9:36So the big question is, can these progressives who have been winning, can they win? So you go online today, you see Matt Iglesias and Tom Friedman are both telling Abdul El-Sayed how to tack to the center. Do you think that the progressive candidates who have won in places like Michigan and Colorado and New York. Do you think that they begin to do that? Yeah, there is a conversation on the left about how to get past a couple of their positions, because media is very flat now. If you said something five years ago, and it's on video or it's on audio, it doesn't matter. You can explain it. It's still going to be used against you.

10:15And it could just be used against you for free. You don't need to pay money in a TV ad. You could just get it into people's social media feeds. So the left is trying to win with the baggage of a lot of cultural positions it has taken. That's some that are shared by Democrats. For example, Minnesota also had primaries yesterday. The Lieutenant Governor Peggy Flanagan won by a landslide the Senate nomination. Democrats were worried at one level about, oh, can she be tied to the fraud cases in the state? A little bit complicated story there where Democrats will tell you they put in a bunch of anti-fraud measures as soon as this issue the issue of people stealing from COVID funds and welfare funds blew up in 2021 uh but Republicans also think Flanagan because of things she has said about trans rights and there I asked her about a a t-shirt she wore at a conference where the state was becoming kind of a trans refuge for red states where people were fleeing with their kids um she She wore a shirt that said protect trans kids with pictures of combat knives on it.

11:18I asked her what it meant. She said, I wore a shirt and these are my values. I'm not trying to get too far afield. I'm just saying that people are not getting to run pure campaigns based on here are my top 10 most popular populist economic issues. The left also culturally believes in a few big ideas that sound alienating to more conservative people. There's just a lot in left-wing politics, especially left-wing politics that is strongest in college towns, that is not – I'd say that is part of the cocktail of reasons that, let's say, eastern Iowa or northwest Wisconsin or places that were Democratic 20 years ago are no longer Democratic.

12:01And it's a very big debate inside the party, but it's a debate that starts with Trump winning. And could Trump have won? Could he have converted so many people if our party culturally did not go so far to the left?

12:20That was Semaphore's Dave Weigel. Coming up, the problem trailing some of these Democrats. Their woke era. AOC admits woke one was crazy. Is that going to be enough?

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16:16This is Today Explained. My name is Estet Herndon. I host a politics podcast called America Actually here at Vox. And I am an editorial director. OK, so AOC recently came out and said Woke One was crazy. She was citing one of her city councilmen. But let's talk about what we think she was talking about. What did she mean? Well, I think Wokwan has become a kind of catch-all term for what's meant to really refer to a period of several years. I think we're talking about first-term Trump and the liberal Democratic reaction to it, particularly in the kind of 2018 through pandemic and aftermath period.

17:00And I think that time was most clearly defined by a Democratic Party that was responding to Trump's attacks on identity, his kind of explicit language about, I think, kind of like a white masculinity politics. Don't worry about it. Don't worry about it a little, Marco. Gentlemen, gentlemen. We have some bad hombres here and we're going to get them out. He's a war hero because he was captured. I like people that weren't captured. OK, I hate to tell you. And they really embraced their own kind of identity forward version of politics. This is the period of like, you know, the infographics telling you it's not my job to educate you.

17:35And, you know, all the focus on structural racism. And I think particularly reached its peak after George Floyd's murder in 2020. There are a few phrases that have entered the national conversation over and over again. White privilege, systemic racism and implicit bias. And yesterday, more than two dozen lawmakers decided to kneel in Kente Clough in his honor. First of all, who gave the white folks to Kente Clough? The DNC acknowledges and honors the Dakota Oyate, the Dakota people, who are the original stewards of the lands and waters of Minneapolis for thousands of years before colonization.

18:14We have to stay woke. Like everybody needs to be woke. and you can talk about if you're the wokest or woker but just stay more woke than less woke and so when AOC was talking and I think refers to what Councilman Ochoa said in terms of woke one was crazy I think they're trying to step away from the most controversial statements of that time particularly statements on social media that have come back to congressional candidates we've seen throughout the year I'm thinking about Daria Liza Avila Chevalier who was the candidate New York City. We said things like all deportations are bad or expletive F Kamala Harris.

18:54Like those are things that people are now asking candidates about as being mitchmatches for the moment that did have some resonance and popularity at the time. So I think when we say woke one versus woke two, we're really talking about Democrats reaction to Trump the first time versus the second time. Okay, so Ested, you're talking about a period of years, let's say 2018, 2020. Let's take us up to the present day. We had Francesca Hong lose a primary election in Wisconsin. How much do you think you can blame that on her past woke statements, which her opponents and others were happy to drag up over the past couple of weeks?

19:32Yeah, I think it's a mistake to take anything as fully causational, but I don't think that they're irrelevant. You know, Francesca Hong faced a lot of criticism for past statements, most famously canceled Thanksgiving, which he tweeted. There was a there was a sense that Francesca Hong kind of represented a human form of like the most egregious tweets of that era. And so that was certainly something that her Democratic opponents focused on and Republicans focused on. They pour four million dollars into hoping that she won the primary and thought that it would be easier to beat her in a general election.

20:06What we saw this week in Wisconsin was a consolidation around her opponent. And I think that really shows that the Democratic establishment's kind of death notice was sent too soon. You know, there is a playbook that they can run quite successfully that really centers around electability. And I think woke one in her previous statements play into that concern. But I don't think we should say it was just canceled. Thanksgiving is the reason she lost. What I think is the bigger thing is that, you know, moderate, more traditional Democrats were able to make the argument that this is an unserious person.

20:39And so the tweets added up to that, which was not just about the statements themselves, but I think really about a lack of a legislative record overall. And so those things played in concert with one another and I think helped Crawley to victory. Have Democratic voters changed? Has what they want, what they are willing to tolerate from their candidates changed in the past couple of years? Yeah, I think absolutely. But, you know, I think to have a real convo about this, we have to acknowledge the like the ways that the term wokeness was always not encompassing a diverse set of beliefs among Democratic base.

21:16I mean, think back to 2020. I think the policy that's most associated with this moment is probably defund the police. But I say this as someone who was at George Floyd's memorial in Houston, who was at North Minneapolis when city councilors were making a pledge to defund. There was never consistency among voters about that policy. This November, voters will decide whether to adopt a new amendment to replace the Minneapolis Police Department with the Department of Public Safety. The numbers ping pong around when we get to the Black Lives Matter defund the police questions. For example, nearly 58 percent of you support the Black Lives Matter movement.

21:53But when you look at whether defund the police gets any traction, it's a resounding no. Right. Like that was much more of a certain class of Democratic activists and elected officials who reflected their language than it was reflected across the Democratic base at large. So there's always been a misalignment between what voters feel are priorities of social justice, of criminal justice reform, of ideals they still care about, like diversity, equity and inclusion and how those things were being talked about. I think particularly in elite liberal circles. So that gap is still informing for when we think about what has changed since.

22:29But to actually answer the question, sure, a lot of things have changed in that time. Really, I think, you know, Democrats were so focused on issues like representation. And I think there was an argument that was kind of coming from the Obama era that Trump's biggest sin wasn't just, you know, his kind of willingness to blow up norms and all those things was that the right people were in the room. There wasn't a diverse room that represented the country. And in a world of acknowledging racism, sexism, discrimination against LGBTQ people, that there would be this like emerging majority that comes from that.

23:02They learned that that wasn't true, that, you know, even values like representation have resonance among a certain group of Democrats. But that's not necessarily universally believed. And so there's been a pivot to focus more on issues like affordability, which have a more universal resonance. The idea being that they should be pitching policies that have a tangible effect to more people rather than a symbolic effect for some people. You know, one of the more interesting reactions to AOC's statement that I saw came from people online who I think once upon a time would have voted Democrat, but came out and said, you know, wokeness was serious.

23:38It affected my life. Some people say, you know, there's the wokeness destroyed my life essay. I lost my job or I was penalized at work or I was treated differently. There are people who really do feel like that period in history was out of control and affected them personally. And I guess the question is, can the Democrats get those people back? I thought by copping to it, AOC would be praised more than she is. And instead, what I see is just a lot of continuing animosity. Yeah, well, I think there's not consensus about whether those values are things that live in this version of the Democratic Party or not, right?

24:11So for a lot of people, wokeness is not dead. This is a clear takeaway we have from our reporting on America. Actually, the base still talks a lot about diversity, equity and inclusion. We hear about reparations at town halls, like the kind of things that I think some people have said are dead or even the kind of leading with identity politics or land acknowledgments. In some ways, we're talking about different groups within the Democratic Party. Right. And so to say that this has been completely sidelined or is returning is, I think, flattening some of those differences. But to go back to the question, like, Lord knows there are people whose lives were materially changed by that time and may, you know, hold some personal resentment.