(The Center Square) – While some politicians may be using “woke” politics as a wedge in the upcoming political seasons, it may be a lesser concern for voters.
As the featured speaker for last week’s Republican Day at the Illinois State Fair, South Carolina Republican State GOP Chairman and RNC co-chair Drew McKissick said the Democratic party is “the party of woke.”
“They are the party of pronouns. They are the party who can’t decide what bathroom people are supposed to go to,” McKissick said. “I mean, these are the people who gave us a United States Supreme Court justice who doesn’t know what a woman is for goodness sake.”
The day before, Illinois U.S. Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Springfield, brushed off such attacks.
“Let’s go out in the fairgrounds here. Pick 100 people and ask them what the hell that means,” Durbin said. “People don’t know what they’re talking about. ‘Florida is anti woke.’ What is that all about?”
Gov. J.B. Pritzker told Democrats at a party brunch last week that Republicans say they want to solve problems.
“But then they spend all of their time screaming conspiracy theories about ‘the purge,’ about Disney, about green M&Ms, about space lasers,” Pritzker said.
Other Democrats criticized Republicans for what they allege is an effort to “ban books.” Republican state Rep. Marty McLaughlin said he doesn’t know where the book ban talk comes from.
“But I’m still trying to figure out why my daughter is safer at an AMC theater with age appropriate rankings for movies, but not at a school library,” McLaughlin told The Center Square. “To me, that’s unreasonable. I want to return to reasonable as a Republican in Illinois and I think a lot of people feel the same way.”
The Center Square Voters’ Voices poll with Nobel Predictive Insights found of 2,500 registered voters surveyed, 13% said “woke government policies” were among their top three issues in the lead up to the 2024 General Election.
Among those polled, 21% of Republicans, 4% of Democrats and 14% of Independents had “woke government policies” as among their top three issues.
