By Paul A. Djupe, Director of Data for Political Research

It has been hard to avoid hearing the term “woke” if you’ve been paying any attention to presidential politics of the last year. And it’s not being used in a flattering light. In an attempt to build the same enthusiasm from Trump voters, Republican hopefuls have been waging a “war on woke.” Perhaps Florida governor Ron DeSantis has been its primary combatant, arguing at a campaign event:

“We will fight the woke in the legislature. We will fight the woke in education. We will fight the woke in the businesses. We will never, ever surrender to the woke mob. Our state is where woke goes to die.”

It’s clearly a way to signal to white voters a certain racial tone in the same way that politicians once talked about their opposition to “busing” as a way to signal their racial conservatism without saying as much. What’s particularly interesting to me is that the Republican base doesn’t appear interested in this. As one bit of evidence, at an early September Republican candidate debate, none of the candidates mentioned the word until two hours in. Given the frequency with which they said woke before that, it seems their internal polling is telling them something.

The term has an old and interesting history, with at least one scholar pointing to writing from Marcus Garvey in 1923 as the origin point (“Wake up Africa!”). The more recent incarnation used in the same way dates to a 1962 piece in the New York Times from William Kelley, “If You’re Woke, You Dig it.” It gained public attention in the last 15 years or so attached to social justice generally – DEI and other reform efforts, often in the wake of public tragedy of police shootings.

Is there any enthusiasm for the concept on campus? In our recently wrapped survey, we asked student respondents how they felt toward the word “‘wokeness ‘ – being woke” on a 0-100 “feeling thermometer.” The average is just a 43 and there are a lot of cool (i.e., negative) feelings. For perspective, Greek life gets a 45 average, Trump’s average is 17, while Joe Biden’s is just 42 right now.

The following figure shows the distribution by class year and a couple of things stand out. Upperclassmen are the most negative, especially seniors, while underclassmen are more likely to shrug with a score of 50 – 50 is often the score people pick when they don’t really have an opinion. There are not many positive feelings.

Here’s a good example of that interpretation of 50 by comparing the distribution of scores toward wokeness and Denison Forward (DF) below. DF is an administrative committee that is working on DEI initiatives at Denison, formed when the push for more DEI initiatives was at its peak. I don’t think it has much of a public face and students ratified that with a huge concentration of 50 scores. Feelings toward the two things should be related given the mandate of DF, but it’s just not there in the data.

Maybe wokeness has a partisan lilt to it. That’s one of the conclusions that Ezra Klein draws about race – Americans have sorted into the two parties based strongly on their racial attitudes. Republicans collect racial conservatives with strong racial resentment sentiments, while Democrats host racial liberals. The election of Barack Obama and then the George Floyd protests really accelerated these trends. In some ways, white Democrats are even more racially liberal than Black Democrats, something Matthew Yglesias refers to as The Great Awokening.

On campus, it’s not surprising to see that Republicans are quite cold toward wokeness, but no one is really excited about it either (see the graph below – the vertical black line is the median of that group). The only group that has a warm feeling (>50 on the scale) is strong Democrats. Every one else averages 50 or less. That, of course, doesn’t mean they’re hostile, but it sure doesn’t stir the blood and there are factions within each group that have quite low levels of warmth toward the concept.

Nevertheless, there are some differences within the parties by race. As the figure below shows, Black students have more positive feelings toward wokeness than others, though it should be noted that even Black Democrats, who almost average 60, aren’t super enthusiastic about the concept. It’s also notable that whites and Hispanics are on the same page within their partisan groups. This is not a split that divides racial minorities from the white majority. It’s more complex than that.

We live in interesting times when sometimes obscure words or phrases can be quickly turned into headlines and perhaps cudgels by the other side. Woke is clearly one of them, ‘defund the police’ is another, but so is ‘Christian nationalism’ – an academic term that has become an identity that some (on the right) take on. Not that long ago, I would have regarded many of these terms as shibboleths that apply only to ingroups that like the term and what it stands for. But with social media, it is easy to find such talk, see how it’s used and who uses it, and see the potential for signaling ingroup and outgroup boundaries. Republicans have been particularly adept at this or seem energized by the “outrage of the week.” I don’t think that possibility is going to stop anyone from deploying such terms, but it should encourage thinking carefully about the language they use and whether they want it to represent people like them in public debates.

Paul A. Djupe is a local cyclist who runs the Data for Political Research minor. He started onetwentyseven.blog a few years ago in a bid to subsidize collective action and spread accurate knowledge about campus and what goes on there. He also writes about religion and politics in the US.