It was nearly two hours into the first Republican primary debate before any of the eight contenders on stage uttered the word “woke.”
Toward the end of the Fox News event, former South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley was the first to say it, during a segment about whether candidates would shut down the Department of Education and whether trans athletes playing sports is “the women’s issue of our time”: “We can talk about all these things and there’s a lot of crazy woke things happening in schools, but we’ve got to get these kids reading,” she said. She argued for classroom transparency and vocational education without explaining what the “woke things” are or why they are threatening.
The silence on what has been a rallying call for some Republicans, many of whom were on the stage, was notable, and adds to a growing body of evidence that Republican attacks on schools and curriculum may not be resonating, even with their own voters.
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, the candidate who has fashioned himself the champion of the so-called “war on woke,” didn’t even mention the word, though he complained briefly about educational indoctrination and mentioned that he eliminated “critical race theory” and “gender ideology” from Florida’s K-12 schools.
Republicans have been waging a “war on wokeness” since Donald Trump took office, even though it had not yet been assigned that name. Recent polls show, however, that Republican voters don’t care much for it. A July New York Times and Siena College poll of Republican voters conducted nationally found that candidates wouldn’t necessarily gain support for simply focusing on quashing “wokeness,” or left-wing ideology, in schools, corporations, or culture at large. Instead, they were more interested in candidates who focused on the economy or on “law and order.” Perhaps Republicans got the message and pivoted away from the term just in time for the debate.
But even if…
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