Wokeness, as I define in my new book, The Third Awokening, is “the making sacred of historically marginalized race, gender and sexual identity groups.” The ideology’s adherents pursue a form of cultural socialism, agitating for equal outcomes (“Diversity, Equity”) and emotional-harm protection (“Inclusion”) on these groups’ behalf.

Woke ideology has swept the Western world and, increasingly, helped to determine elections. Directly, woke activists’ efforts have created novel political questions—such as whether to allow men who identify as women in female spaces, to teach critical race and gender ideology in schools and workplaces, or to permit institutions to censor free speech—that affect how people vote. Indirectly, woke taboos around race, sex, and gender shut down debate in progressive circles and lead politicians to embrace policies on issues like immigration, crime, and health that put them at odds with voters.

The indirect effect actually has a bigger electoral impact. Take immigration, for example. In the heady days of the “Great Awokening,” progressives argued that American efforts to prevent illegal immigration constituted racist acts by a white supremacist nation. In turn, many Democratic activists and donors pledged to “abolish ICE” and contended that “no person is illegal.” In keeping with the mood, then-Senator Kamala Harris embraced an open-borders agenda that would have been inconceivable during the Clinton or Obama eras. Then, the Biden administration, with Harris as vice president, undid many of Donald Trump’s border policies, prompting a massive surge of illegal migration. This chain of events helped bring about Harris’s decisive loss at the ballot box.

Law enforcement is another instructive issue. By the principles of wokeness, if locking up felons results in a disproportionately black and Latino prison population, then doing so is “systemically racist.” Woke activists repeated this charge to progressive leaders, who in turn embraced lax law enforcement. In 2014, for example, California reclassified thefts under $950 from felonies to misdemeanors, in a measure that voters partially repealed earlier this month. Crime, like immigration, was a decisive issue in 2024, helping to tip the election to Trump.

While anti-woke positions are broadly popular, they generally rank low among voters’ priorities. I’ve conducted surveys across the U.S., Canada, and U.K., which show that respondents disfavored the woke position on culture-war issues by a two-to-one margin. But a Harvard–Harris preelection poll found that “political correctness/cancel culture” ranked just 22nd out of 28 among voters’ most important issues. Even among conservatives, the culture war is a middling concern, mattering most to the one-third of Republicans who follow political podcasts and YouTube channels on a weekly basis.

While many voters dismiss wokeness in the abstract, they are attuned to its concrete effects, such as the presence of males in women’s sports. Additionally, politicians or the media can encourage voters to care about the culture war.

In Scotland, for example, the media took the lead. First Minister Nicola Sturgeon’s Gender Recognition Act, which would have enabled people to change their legal gender more quickly, evaded scrutiny until the press publicized a photo of a tattooed male rapist, Adam Graham (a.k.a. Isla Bryson), entering a women’s prison. The photo helped lead to Sturgeon’s downfall, especially since she repeatedly refused to say whether Bryson was a man or a woman.

In the United States, politicians have often made the culture war central to their campaigns—to great electoral effect. In Virginia’s 2021 gubernatorial contest, for instance, Glenn Youngkin’s campaign spotlighted schools’ race- and gender-indoctrination efforts. His opponent, Terry McAuliffe, tried to obfuscate and deny before fatefully claiming that parents should not be telling schools what to teach. This tin-eared reply helped Youngkin flip a solidly blue state that Joe Biden had won by 10 points only a year earlier.

Similarly, Trump’s ad about Harris supporting publicly funded transgender surgery for felons and illegal immigrants—ending with the punch line, “Kamala is for they/them. President Trump is for you”—contributed to his victory. According to postelection polling, Harris’s focus “on cultural issues like transgender issues rather than helping the middle class” was the most important predictor of voters switching from Biden to Trump. One Harris-friendly pollster found that the ad was effective with suburban white women and black and Hispanic voters, and “shifted the race 2.7 percentage points in Mr. Trump’s favor after viewers watched it,” per the New York Times.

These cases illustrate that, in the culture war, concrete beats abstract. My research confirms as much: I asked a group of Canadian respondents whether a trans-identifying teacher with size-seven prosthetic breasts should be allowed to teach, and the respondents split evenly between “yes” and “no.” When I asked a second group the same question, but included a picture of the teacher wearing the oversized breasts, the respondents opposed allowing the teacher to teach by a resounding 75–11 margin.

Whether it’s the media or politicians taking the lead, then, voters can be nudged to care about wokeness—and vote accordingly. Last week’s results prove as much. Each time a culture war issue breaks through in an election, it becomes harder for the Left to return to the status quo ante. This is as it should be. The whole point of democracy is to resolve conflicting values and group claims, not shield them from debate in a drawer marked “sacred.”

Photo by Ira L. Black/Corbis via Getty Images

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