Welcome to The Midterms, Actually. Every week I’ll be writing about two things: one big idea or trend I see forming across the 2026 primaries, and one thing I’m hearing from a voice on the ground. Let’s get into it.
One big idea: Lessons from “Woke 1”
Earlier this week, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) flashed her political dexterity on ABC’s This Week when she was asked about the policies of Peak Woke — call it Woke 1, that stretch around the 2020 pandemic when the American liberal machine seemed to be at its political and cultural height. “I have a local city councilman who has this saying,” the Bronx congresswoman said. “Woke 1 was crazy.”
She was quoting a tweet from Chi Ossé, a New York City Council member from Brooklyn, but the point underneath it was the real tell. The Democrats’ emerging left — fresh off primary victories in New York, Colorado, and now Michigan — has developed a playbook for handling any unpopular stance, or tweet, from the early 2020s, whether it’s pandemic masking, defunding the police, or the broader vocabulary of that summer.
The new plan: Brush it off. Then refocus on the present, and on the policies that will actually make people’s lives better.
So far, the strategy is working. Zohran Mamdani walked back his support for defunding the police during his 2025 mayoral campaign and is now the mayor of New York. Darializa Avila Chevalier, the DSA-backed congressional candidate in New York’s 13th District, had a stack of deleted posts that CNN’s KFile resurfaced this June — including one that read “all deportations are wrong.” When I asked her about them, she didn’t disavow a word. She won her primary, albeit in a deep-blue district, anyway. Wisconsin gubernatorial candidate Francesca Hong had a bad case of the woke mind virus in 2020 — the “cancel Thanksgiving” kind — and she’s still in the hunt in this week’s Democratic primary, where her candidacy has been far more focused on issues like data centers and education funding.
Electorally, at least, Ossé has been proven right. The pandemic was wild, and primary voters seem to be extending progressives a grace period of sorts — a chance to reintroduce themselves after workshopping their ideas over the last five years. And while Republicans are still hopeful they can relitigate some of these fights in a general election, they’ve struggled to make them stick in high-profile races since 2024.
But these are also the issues — race, gender, sexuality, affirmative action, religion, cancel culture — where the simplest story gets repeated out of ease. The national media’s distance from everyday people, and especially from working-class people of color, is felt most in how it covers culture. Catch-all terms like “wokeness” flatten real differences across the electorate and quietly impose a conservative frame on genuine arguments about equity and inclusion.
That was one of my biggest takeaways from that 2020 summer: our collective discomfort with all of these issues in the first place. I watched that year up close, traveling with Democratic and Republican candidates through the pandemic and the racial-justice protests, and there was never a clean “Two Americas” moment — at least not the left-versus-right one everyone expected. The real gap was between Masked America — coastal, professional, absolutely consumed by identity politics — and everyone else. Among ordinary voters of all parties, and especially minority voters, there was significantly more skepticism from the start toward the highly-specific “woke 1” litmus tests now being renounced by their leading proponents. At George Floyd’s memorial in Houston and in the city where he died, there was no consensus on defunding the police, only a shared agreement about racial injustice and a deep distrust of institutions. In south Chicago, people were already skeptical that the sudden flood of corporate money into racial justice would outlast the moment — even while the checks were still being written.
So no, I don’t love the tidy language of Woke 1 (then) versus Woke 2 (now). But here are a few lessons from that summer — and from our recent reporting on America, Actually — that I think apply now, especially to the progressives stepping back from things they used to say.
1. Woke isn’t dead
The broad ideals — diversity, equity, a basic sense of fairness — still matter to Democratic voters. Criminal justice reform still has real purchase with the base. Minority and women candidates have kept winning since 2024, and even ideas like reparations still resonate with big chunks of the Democratic electorate. What’s changed isn’t who these candidates are — it’s what they choose to lead with.
What has fallen out of favor is a way of talking. Let’s say it’s the nonprofit register, or the Ford Foundation cadence — the language that lived in mission statements and land acknowledgments, or that made sweeping generalizations about a specific group — white women, cis men, you name it. David Axelrod, describing Wisconsin’s Francesca Hong, gave it this label: a “font of zany liberal, faculty lounge exotica.” Yes, that’s the part that’s gotten less popular. The vocabulary changed more than the values.
2. The left rewrote its message after 2024
The clearest change is the affordability pivot. When Abdul El-Sayed ran for Michigan governor in 2018, the animating cause was climate and a Green New Deal. Today the center of gravity has moved to economic populism, affordability, and a rethinking of the US relationship with Israel. Climate didn’t vanish, but it’s no longer the headline. And “representation” was, at its core, a white-collar frame — it spoke loudest to people already inside the room.
Affordability speaks to everyone. When I sat down with El-Sayed on the show, this is how he described what Michigan voters were actually asking:
“Who poses the biggest pushback to a system of politics that has been bought off in ways that leave me unable to afford my groceries, unable to afford a home, unable to look at my kid’s school and believe that that’s a good place for them, unable to get healthcare when I need it — and then sending my money abroad, telling me that somehow that’s in my best interest?”
That’s not the language of 2020. It’s economic, universal, and it doesn’t ask anyone to first pass a vocabulary test.
It helps to remember that Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) was never really “woke.” He talked about class more than culture, the many against the money. And it repeatedly got him into trouble, leading him to adopt more of the left’s rhetoric and positions on identity and race after 2016. In 2028, the sweet spot is probably the middle, and that’s what the next generation of progressives — AOC, Mamdani, El-Sayed — can do better than their Burlington forefather. They’re fluent in blending the class critique and the social one without missing a beat.
“This is about the many versus the money,” El-Sayed told me. “If you support a politics of the UAW, of working people everywhere, of teachers, of nurses, of working families, of Bernie Sanders and AOC, of people who want to break the chokehold of corporations and special interests on our politics — this is that race.”
3. Democratic voters have changed
Progressives never had enough power to implement their most controversial ideas en masse (the Minneapolis City Council was backtracking off “defunding the police” by the summer of 2021). Instead, “woke,” as a cultural phenomenon, took its deepest hold in liberal and academic circles. So the corporate whiplash that followed — the rush to embrace new HR trainings, new DEI policies, and new vocabulary in 2020 and the quiet discarding of it a couple of years later — was felt most acutely by college-educated progressives themselves, and not by the more working-class voters cable news often invokes as most alienated by this period.
I think this speaks to Ossé’s tweet, and why the grace period is real. And I think we can’t underrate how many voters have been on a similar journey since 2020 — being genuinely shocked by the video of George Floyd’s murder, agreeing in large part with the ideals of progressive activists, and maybe coming to disagree on the specifics in hindsight. In some ways, it reminds me of the way MAGA voters heard out now-Vice President JD Vance’s journey from Trump critic to Trump loyalist. The audience is willing to believe the candidate’s evolution because they’ve been on a similar one.
I think part of the reason “Woke 1” had a short shelf life was that it was based on a rigid framework of race and identity that has already been proven outdated. The binary that has guided most political discourse about race in the Democratic Party — with Black people on one side and white people on the other — is more outdated every election cycle. The emergence of Latino, Asian, and Arab swing voters has created coalitions for candidates beyond the Democrats’ traditional base.
Diversity, equity, and inclusion already mean something different than in 2020, and that’s what the next Democratic presidential primary will sort out.
4. The establishment’s credibility collapse is the bigger story
But, of course, the reaction to Donald Trump’s first presidency is different than the reaction to the second one. There have been material changes to the country, and voters aren’t weighing progressives against some pristine center. They’re weighing them against an establishment they believe has lied to them and fumbled the things that mattered, from inflation and immigration in Joe Biden’s presidency to his decision to run for reelection.
That was the theme of my recent interview with Rep. Jim Clyburn (D-SC). Asked what the party should learn from 2024, he pointed the finger at Black voters — arguing Vice President Kamala Harris would have won if turnout had been higher. And while I appreciated the congressman’s candor, that sentiment — pervasive among moderate Democrats right now — is exactly why the establishment is in the predicament it’s in. Yes, there are real policy fights, over corporate PAC money and Medicare-for-all. But voters are also rejecting an insular way of doing politics, one built in the pre-Trump era, that refuses to account for its own failures.
The Democratic Party leadership is on the defensive, and handwringing about “woke” — and its so-called excesses — is fighting the last war. It’s what helped Trump get elected in 2024. I don’t think it’s going to win elections in 2026 or 2028.
Also, I think most people have moved on. The scope of Trump’s actions in his second term are so severe, and the backlash to anything “DEI” adjacent is so total, that the mild annoyance of Peak Woke seems tame in comparison.
What I’m hearing
With the Wisconsin primary today, I talked with Sachin Chheda, a progressive strategist in Wisconsin who works on Democratic elections for issues and candidates. He oversaw winning campaigns for Wisconsin’s all-important elections in the state Supreme Court. He is the principal at Earthrise Strategies.
Is the expectation at this point that Francesca Hong is going to win?
I think that’s the most likely scenario, but politics in Wisconsin is like the weather, and you can see big swings in a very short period of time.
The contours of this race have sort of been confounding, starting with Lt. Gov. Sara Rodriguez, and then the collapse of Mandela Barnes. Should we see this race as Hong winning? Or the Dem establishment failing to organize itself?
I think it’s two things.
First of all, the other candidates, who run the gamut from farther left to close to centrist, all underestimated Fran.
She really hit on where the electorate is — especially on Gaza and data centers. Gaza isn’t a central issue of this campaign, but it’s a signal, and just like Joe Biden, most of the other candidates missed it, while her supporters centered it.
And she just has her finger on the pulse of the electorate on data centers, while most of the other candidates were more focused on navigating the building trades politics. Again, not the central issue for most voters — but being the lone candidate against data centers sent a signal and allowed her to differentiate herself.
The other thing is the “alternative-to-Fran” candidates didn’t coalesce — the opposite of what happened with Biden in South Carolina. There’s some real differences among the candidates, there’s some real ill-feeling and animosity and history among them, and there’s real resentment of Gov. [Tony] Evers’s late power move.
Is there any risk Wisconsin Democrats have an issue uniting ahead of November?
Competitive primaries are always tough on the candidates, on activists, on volunteers…and fun for pundits!
But I have no doubt that whomever wins, Wednesday in Wisconsin will be just like Michigan last week — where a close race still ended in a quick endorsement and a very public show of unity among the candidates.
All of the Democrats support lowering the cost of healthcare and childcare, funding public schools, taxing the rich, building more housing, putting guardrails on data centers, protecting civil rights, blocking ICE from kidnapping Wisconsinites, and stopping the corruption of the Trump administration and the MAGA agenda. They of course differ on many of the details, and that’s why we have the primary election. There will always be some folks at the margins who don’t get on the train, but 99% of Democrats will support the nominee and oppose far-right extremist MAGA goofball Tom Tiffany.
Author: Source Author
Source: Vox.
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