When Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) was asked Sunday about some of the more inflammatory comments and positions from the left flank of the Democratic Party, the congresswoman quoted a New York City Council member to make her point.
“Woke 1 was crazy,” Ocasio-Cortez said, echoing what the council member, Chi Ossé, has said, before laughing along with ABC’s Jonathan Karl during an appearance on “This Week.”
The moment, political observers say, was consequential because while she borrowed the phrase, Ocasio-Cortez’s laugh underscored a shift of sorts by a Democratic Party that is trying to figure out how to move on from the woke era.
It is a party that seemingly wants to rebuild itself with progressive positions but does not want to be defined by the most extreme examples of cancel culture.
To put it simply, the party wants to stick to its roots without being accused of wanting to cancel Thanksgiving, a position Francesca Hong, the democratic socialist gubernatorial candidate in Wisconsin who lost her primary Tuesday, once took online.
Hong, who lost the race by a small margin to moderate David Crowley, spent the final days of the campaign overexplaining and walking back the comments that ultimately ended up defining her campaign.
“If you’re explaining, you’re losing,” one Democratic strategist said. “The comments she made, even if they were in the deep past, did her in. They became headlines today. And right or wrong, she was tagged to them and it hurt her campaign.”
There’s no question Democrats have faced a reckoning with voters over the excesses of woke. One of President Trump’s most successful ads of the 2024 cycle offered a nod to the issue, saying Democratic presidential nominee “Kamala [Harris] is for they/them” while “Trump is for you.”
The rhetoric was focused on issues involving the transgender community, but the message may have resonated well beyond it.
Republicans reacted to Ocasio-Cortez’s woke remarks with a bit of incredulity, while saying they weren’t going to let her laugh it off.
“AOC walking back her support for wokeism is peak revisionist history,” Republican strategist Brian Seitchik said, referring to the lawmaker by a nickname. “She wasn’t some innocent bystander who got swept up in the insanity. She was one of the loudest and most recognizable ringleaders.”
“Next she’ll tell us she has a ‘Back the Blue’ sticker on her Prius and spent 2020 imploring Democrats to give the police more money,” Setichik added. “AOC must think American citizens are stupid if she believes anyone is buying this fiction.”
Republican strategist Doug Heye said Republicans will hold her accountable because she was at the forefront of the progressive movement.
“The zany cast of characters she has inspired may stay (Mamdani} or go (Hong), but she was the tip of the spear and remains a strong fundraiser for the GOP,” Heye said in a text, referring to New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani and Francesca Hong.
Some Democrats say the conversation Ocasio-Cortez is a part of is deeply necessary.
“It’s totally appropriate for any Democratic elected official to have some reflection and look back and say that those conversations were productive but we didn’t nail all of them,” Democratic strategist Joel Payne said.
“I think it’s OK to say the intention was spot on but the execution was inconsistent,” Payne said, adding that voters will accept an honest dialogue on the previous ways.
Democratic strategist Basil Smikle, who served as the executive director of the New York State Democratic Party, said 2020, when some of the “woke” language was adopted by Democrats, was an unusual time.
Much of the nation was locked down in their homes by the coronavirus pandemic. From that isolated spot, Americans watched video of the killing of George Floyd by a police officer in Minneapolis. The officer, who knelt on Floyd’s neck, was later convicted of murder.
The killing ignited the Black Lives Matter movement and resulted in massive protests. It also led to calls from some Democrats to defund the police, a debate the party is still grappling with and that Republicans have used against them.
“In many ways, a lot of the individuals and entities wanted to show their support for the movement,” Smikle said. “Some of it was knee-jerk and inarticulate. Some of it was well-meaning.
“But all of this gets moderate over time because the movement comes down from its peak of intensity and people start to wrestle with everyday reality.”
The latest talk about woke comes amid a tense battle within the Democratic Party between the establishment and a far-left that had been building momentum before Hong’s defeat. Democratic socialists who have won a string of victories around the country want to change the Democratic Party’s direction.
Democratic socialist positions — and language used by candidates — has created another rift among moderates and the left about what their messaging should be in the final stretch of the midterms and beyond.
Moderates argue that to win contests across the country, candidates have to run on a more unifying message and use rhetoric that appeals beyond the base.
“For Democrats to compete in the middle-ground districts they need to win, they have to be focused on local economic insecurities and how the chaos of the Trump administration is impacting people’s security and wallets,” said former Rep. Steve Israel (D-N.Y.), who served as the former chair of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee.
“‘Defund the police’ is the wrong message in the wrong districts,” Israel said. “The one thing that might unite the far left with moderate Democrats is the need to win the midterms and place a check on Donald Trump. That means messaging on the basis of sound strategy tailored to specific districts.”
In the interview on “This Week,” Ocasio-Cortez said the conversations around the 2020 election — when the nation was at the height of the lockdown and seeing high unemployment because of the shutdowns — “were quite fruitful.”
“I think that, you know, during lockdown of course, rhetoric in that time is not rhetoric that we would use today,” she said.
Payne agreed, saying that the nation has a different focus.
“We’re at a moment right now where there’s more focus on economic populism,” he said, pointing to Mamdani’s campaign for mayor of New York in which he centered his campaign around overall affordability and housing.
Still, Smikle and others say while Ocasio-Cortez may be trying to turn the page on some of the themes that have stuck to Democrats in recent cycles — particularly if she runs for higher office for a Senate seat or a White House bid — her opponents may not be as willing.
“She may laugh it off but it’s not going to change the label,” he said. “Anyone who is going to attack her is going to use the label.”
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