Today, Explained - “Woke 1 was crazy”

Episode Date: August 13, 2026

The progressive left wants your vote. But some candidates for major races have a lot of online baggage. This episode was produced by Dustin DeSoto, edited by Amina Al-Sadi, fact-checked by Gabriel Dunatov, engineered by David Tatasciore, and hosted by Noel King. Former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and other Democratic lawmakers took a knee on Capitol Hill on June 8, 2020 to observe a moment of silence for George Floyd and other victims of police brutality. Photo by Brendan Smialowski/AFP via Getty Images. Listen to Today, Explained ad-free by becoming a Vox Member: vox.com/members. New Vox members get $20 off their membership right now. Transcript at ⁠vox.com/today-explained-podcast.⁠ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Voters in Wisconsin through 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. In proximity to whiteness continues, right? My son is biracial. He's half-white and half-Korean. and I think navigating 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 Kentecloth.

AOC seemed to acknowledge that on ABCs 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, Explain from Fox. Support for the show comes from KPMG. In any organization, disruption is inevitable, but struggling through it doesn't have to be. The KPMG Adaptability Index is your blueprint for building capabilities to handle what comes next.

It uses real data to look at how your culture, strategy, and partnerships all work together to help your business thrive. Stop reacting and start adapting. Visit KPMG.com slash us slash adaptability to explore the Adaptability Index and Pulse Surveys today. My 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 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. It was a crowded primary. Lieutenant Governor to two-term Governor Tony Ivers was running.

She wasn't getting a lot of momentum. She made a bunch of big mistakes, and Francesca Hong, a state legislator for 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, okay, well, we'll sort this out later. We'll see who the alternatives are. The lieutenant governor collapsed because her campaign manager turned out to be faking her finances. 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'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. He will be an outstanding, outstanding governor.

And as he campaigned around the state with Crowley, 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 very high turnout. So Crowley wins,

Francesca Hong loses the other headline of the day. You could use either headline. They both work. 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 Ivers 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 is very important to her campaign, put a moratorium on data centers? These are popular positions when she said them on the trail, and it's not her 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 was 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, so be it. She not just in 2020, but on social media for years just expressed very, 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 bankshot 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. But 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. Democrats had the choice to nominate the most left-wing candidate possible, and they decided it was too risky. Which, 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? why 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 was Aramadne 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,

I'm tired of funding, funding Israel's wars in Denver. It worked too. But then you get into these swing states and the conversation is different. And if you're in Wisconsin, you're a regular voter 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. So the big question is, can these progressives who have been winning, can they win? So you go online today, you see Madaglacius and Tom Friedman are both telling Abdul al-Sai had attack 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. And 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 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. But Republicans also think Flanagan, because of things she has said about trans rights. And I asked her about 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. She wore a shirt that said, protect trans kids with pictures of combat knives on it. I asked her what men.

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 were no longer Democratic. And 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. That was semaphores Dave Weigel. Coming up, the problem trailing some of these Democrats there, woke era, AOC admits woke one was crazy. Is that going to be enough? Support for the show comes from AG1. Things can become a bit more loose during the summer,

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It's Megan Rapino. I've been thinking a lot about this one question I've been asked over and over. A question about the choices I've made, the colors of my hair, the things in the world I've spoken about, and the things that I haven't. I've heard this question asked so many different ways, but it always came down to, why are you like this? And as you know, there's no simple answer, because people are not simple. were messy and complicated and contradictory and layered.

So on my new show, I'm sitting down with the ultimate disruptors, the athletes, the artists, the activists, and the architects of our culture who looked at the way things were and asked, why do we do it like this? And can we do it differently? My hope is to give us a little more space to that question and to the person on the other side of the mic, not to tell us their answer or read from their script,

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That's growth therapy.com slash explained. Grotherapy.com slash explained. Availability and coverage vary by state and by insurance plan. This is today explained. My name is Sted Herndon. I host a politics podcast called America Actually here at Vox. And I am an editorial director. Okay.

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, well, Guam 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.

And I think that time was most clearly defined by a Democrat. 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. We have some bad umbra's here, and we're going to get him out. He's a war hero because he was captured.

I like people that weren't captured, okay? I hate to tell you. And they really embrace 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 and, you know, all the focus on structural racism. And I think particularly reached this 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. And Kente Kloff, in his honor. First of all, who gave the white folks to Kintech Kloff? The DNC acknowledges and honors the Dakota O Yate, the Dakota people, who are the original stewards of the lands and waters of Minneapolis for thousands of years before colonization. We have to stay woke. Like, everybody needs to be woke. And you can talk about if you're the wokeist or woker, but just stay more woke than less woke. And so when AOC was talking and I think refers to what Councilman Ocio Se said in terms of

the 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 Darya Lisa Auvila Chevalier, who was the candidate in New York City. We said things like all deportations are bad or expletive F. Kamala Harris. Like those are things that people are now asking candidates about as being mismatchezed 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 instead, 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 weeks? Yeah, 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 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 opponent is focused on and Republicans focused on. They pour $4 million into hoping that she won the primary and thought that it would be easier to beat her in a general election. What 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 1 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. But I think it's a bigger thing is that, you know, moderate more traditional Democrats were able to make the argument that this is an unsurious person. And 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 to 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 combo 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. I 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 counselors 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% of you support the Black Lives Matter movement, but when you look at whether defund the police gets any traction, it's a resounding no. Right?

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. changed since. But 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, a determination against LGBTQ people. that there would be this like emerging majority that comes from that. They 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. It 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 a 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? So 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 acknowledgements. 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. But one thing I would say is, like, when we talk about quote unquote woke,

I think we're mostly talking about the most egregions versions, not being policy that was actually passed, but being like a corporate culture of talking, being like, you know, the way, you know, we were adding, you know, trigger warnings to movies on streaming services, things like that. Like, we weren't actually talking about policies that were passed. And so I think for a lot of people, it matters just how much you were offended by those things. So there is been folks material heard. I don't want to like, I don't want to like gloss. over them. I just don't think the actual impact of however woke one may have hurt them

is frankly where most people's heads are right now. Like, to be honest, I think what Donald Trump has done to DEI as a concept, which is basically make it a slur for the larger values of diversity, a questioning of anyone who does not fall within or who has like a kind of marginalized identity. We've ended the tyranny of so-called diversity, equity, and inclusion policies all across the entire federal government and indeed the private sector and our military. This administration has done a great deal from day one to remove the social justice politically correct and toxic ideological garbage that had infected our department. And our country will be woke no longer.

I think most Democrats are feeling upset about that more so than they're feeling angry at the party for having some. inconsistency from 2019, 2020 to now. Like, the Democratic base is looking for people who are reacting to Donald Trump's actions, not necessarily judging them or I think the litmus test media often judges them on, which is their previous statement. So what do you think Democrats do with all of this if they want big wins in November? I don't think we should assume that Republican strategy of making wokenness the focus of November

will be successful. They have tried this in midterms before the argument either way, whether Democratic Socialists would have won or whether establishment Democrats would have won would be to say that the other side is too extreme for median voters. So I don't think that their like strategy changes any. What I think we've seen from Democrats in a substantive shift from four or five years ago are things like Zora Mamdani backing off of defunding the police in a really clear fashion throughout the campaign. But that doesn't mean I think that they don't talk about things that matter to them, right?

Like Zora Mamdani, I was on the trail with him. He talks a lot about his identity as a Muslim, his, you know, about a coalition of immigrants in New York City, that kind of identity forward version of politics. It's just coupled with affordability. It's just coupled with taxing the rich or tangible things with it. And so I think that's what you see. That's what you'll see Democrats do is make sure their affordability focus is the lead. And so even if Republicans do bring those attacks, it will be a mismatch with the message they're giving voters. Vox's Ested Herndon. You can get his newsletter, Midterms, actually, in your inbox every week until the electionvox.com slash midterms actually sign up. It's free.

Dustin DeSoto produced today's show and Amin El Sadi edited. Gabriel Dunatov checked the facts and David Tadishore engineered. I'm Noelle King. It's today explained.