Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez used a blunt phrase this week to describe the early-2020s political moment now being picked apart by Democrats: “Woke 1 was crazy.” On ABC’s This Week, she said, “I have a local city councilman who has this saying,” before delivering the line, a striking public break from the cultural style that once helped define the party’s left edge.
The timing matters because the search around what is woke is no longer just about a word. It is about whether Democrats can keep moving past the pandemic-era mix of masking fights, defund-the-police politics and the broader vocabulary of that summer without sounding as if they are defending a losing era. The emerging left has settled on a simple strategy: brush off unpopular old positions and talk instead about the issues voters are living with now.
That shift is already showing up in the campaigns around it. Zohran Mamdani walked back his support for defunding the police during his 2025 mayoral campaign and is now mayor of New York, a sign that even candidates who came up in that era are learning which arguments no longer travel well. Francesca Hong carries a 2020 record the article describes as the “cancel Thanksgiving” kind, but this week she is still in the hunt in the Democratic primary in Wisconsin and is running on far more specific ground, with her candidacy focused on data centers and education funding.
The line between retreat and reinvention is not clean. In June, ’s KFile resurfaced deleted posts from Darializa Avila Chevalier, including one that said “all deportations are wrong,” yet she still won her primary in New York’s 13th District. That is the part that makes the new playbook less tidy than its advocates suggest: some candidates are trimming old language, while others can survive even when the old posts come back into view.
For all the arguments about wokeness, the bigger problem is that the word flattens real differences. It can blur race, gender, sexuality, affirmative action, religion and cancel culture into one catch-all insult, even though voters do not experience those fights as the same thing. That is also why Republicans have struggled to make these battles stick in high-profile races since 2024, and why the national media’s distance from everyday people, especially working-class people of color, keeps showing up most clearly in how it covers culture. The next test is not whether Democrats stop using the old language altogether. It is whether they can keep separating themselves from Woke 1 without losing the voters who were never talking about it in the first place.
