Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis didn’t just wake up one morning and decide he was being a little too hard on Mickey Mouse. Nope, he likely saw polling on his anti-woke crusade against Disney and its CEO Bob Iger and choked on his morning coffee.
As Politico points out, New York Times/Sienna polling in late July found a 52% majority of Republican primary voters look favorably on a candidate who says government “should stay out of deciding what corporations can support.” Just 38%, by contrast, wanted a candidate who “promises to fight corporations that promote ‘woke’ left ideology.”
Turns out most Republican voters don’t actually want the government sticking its nose into company decisions. That’s likely especially true when that intrusion starts costing a state billions in revenues.
A Morning Consult poll in June also showed less than half of Republican primary voters say companies are too actively promoting social equity and inclusion—or being “too woke,” as DeSantis might put it. So GOP voters aren’t particularly concerned about the battle DeSantis claims to be fighting on their behalf.
DeSantis—who coined the phrase “Florida is where woke goes to die”—has also had trouble defining woke in any sort of meaningful way.
“Look, we know what woke is, it’s a form of cultural Marxism,” DeSantis explained in June. “It’s about putting merit and achievement behind identity politics, and it’s basically a war on the truth.”
Cultural Marxism and attacking the truth don’t exactly sound like issues that keep Republican primary voters up at night.
In fact, if Republican voters are fretting about anything in the early morning hours, it’s government overreach into business practices.
“Republicans are overwhelmingly concerned that we’re going to have too much regulation around these issues,” Jon McHenry, vice president of North Star Opinion Research, told Politico.
DeSantis was likely chewing all this over last week, along with his steadily disintegrating standing in the polls, before appearing on CNBC and declaring his administration had “basically moved on” from his pitched legal duel with Disney.
“What I would say is, drop the lawsuit,” DeSantis offered after claiming Disney would lose its legal challenge against him for “government retaliation.”
Now that’s the appeal of a leader who stands on principle.
Only Ron DeSantis could have succeeded in making his signature issue—anti-wokeness—unpopular. Turns out Florida is where anti-woke went to die.
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