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Notes -
We Won
On Sunday Morning, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez went on ABC's This Week and proclaimed, "Woke 1 was crazy". The immediate context was AOC defending Wisconsin DSA governor candidate Francesca Hong, and so a lot of people are clowning on her for handwaving away everything that happened in 2015-2022. To the extent that this is about who you should vote for in the Wisconsin governor's race, I agree with the criticism, but I want to take a step back and appreciate how far we've come.
Think back to remember how it felt in the dark days of 2020 and 2021. It was far from clear that the reign of terror would ever end. Every week another subreddit or Twitter poster was banned. Facebook was removing posts supporting Kyle Rittenhouse as a policy. "Abolish the Police" was treated as a serious (if aspirational) policy proposal. Above everything else, the worst part was the psychological damage, the feeling that the entire world was going insane; that it was just you and a few guys from a Harry Potter fanfiction forum spinoff who were capable of the miniscule amount of critical thinking required to know that removing Aunt Jemima's face from bottles of pancake syrup did absoutely nothing to help black people.
The fact that even the left-wing of the Democratic Party is campaigning on health care, tax policy, and Palestine instead of racial humiliation is a big deal. There is a temptation to equate "woke" (more specifically "woke 1") with generic liberal Democrat stuff, but that's not really true. Conversely, it becomes easy to overlook some of Trump's greatest accomplishments. Turning DEI and Critical Race Theory into curse words and ending affirmative action were huge. People said it couldn't be done, and then they were done so fast that everyone forgot by the midterms.
I see that Ms. Hong lost, where even Nate over at Silver Bulletin didn't give the winner Crowley a look-in (they had it Hong vs Tiffany), so perhaps woke is slain. Or perhaps not. AOC going "ooh things sure were crazy back then, eh? Ha-ha, those were the days, but we're all grown up now" is very amusing. I've always said she was primarily a political operator and if she thinks the wind is swinging round to a different quarter, it may be worth paying attention.
But mostly I think the craziness is just being skimmed off the top, like fat off a stock, and the main "it's called just being a decent person" bludgeoning remains. Though with Professor Arday also getting critical attention, we'll have to wait and see.
Hong losing has all the calling cards of Atlanta 2020. The only update I can make (and think anyone should) is that Democratic machines are still super powerful and polished and can manipulate any election that is even kinda close. In a general, that means a Republican needs to win by more than 100k to win any statewide with a major Dem metro. In a primary, the upstart probably needs to win real Dem voters by at least 10k.
I think Polymarket and other prediction markets took a hammering on Hong, which makes me laugh also (because I don't think prediction markets are the be-all and end-all), but to be fair, all the polls up till then were showing her leading by a country mile. The margin of loss was so small, I'm sure the conspiracy theories in some quarters will start rumbling if they haven't already.
What I'm really interested to know, if we get any analysis, is why Crowley (the eventual victor) was brought back into the race. Hong was doing extremely well in the polls, but this doesn't seem to have been reflected in the internal party views? Crowley had already dropped out, then as other candidates (who had got party backing) dropped out, Crowley was called back in. Was this because the party wanted an actual Democrat, not a DSA member, as their nominee? He seems to have received the endorsement of the party, but the question remains: how were the polls so wrong, or was this a case of "give us an electable candidate and we'll pick them" for the Democrats? In which case the progressive victories of Mamdani and El-Sayed are not indicators of where the party should turn.
But yeah - "candidate who spent years making herself as unlikeable as possible loses due to mean tweets dug up from the past, well well how the turn tables" will always be funny because of Woke or SJW or PC or the name of the time digging up old tweets and calling for heads on spikes as a result.
The DSA types mostly hate the DNC types. Some, like AOC herself, are opportunistic enough for conversion by management after they get elected (and indeed she’s now basically on the center-left of the party). Others aren’t; after all, Bernie himself still annoys them after all these years. It’s not disastrous for the party if someone like Hong is elected in the long term, necessarily, but it is bad this year and it is possibly bad if the Thanksgiving stuff gets dredged up in the 2028 election even if it’s only part of a woke left montage in GOP attack ads. It’s also a gubernatorial position, which further tilts the logic for party leadership toward the maybe less galvanizing centrist because control of congress isn’t at stake.
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