Democrats have a new talking point for the 2026 midterms, and it’s a doozy: the party wants you to believe the whole 2020-era meltdown (defund the police, kente-cloth photo ops, hyperfixation on gender and sex) was just a weird, isolated fever it caught during lockdown and has since fully recovered from. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez kicked off the branding exercise on ABC’s “This Week”, borrowing a line from a New York City councilman: “Woke 1 was crazy.” Within days, New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani was echoing the same line at a press conference, insisting “what you believe can change” while distancing himself from his own defund-the-police past. It’s not one congresswoman having a candid moment. It’s a coordinated cycle-wide message: Woke 1 is dead, don’t worry about it, just yell about Israel and “Medicare for All.”
Here’s the problem with the sales pitch: nobody bothered to tell the rest of the party that Woke 1 was supposed to have left the building.
Start with the DNC’s own leadership circus this year. David Hogg — the Parkland-shooting-survivor-turned-professional-activist the party spent years grooming as the “future” — got elected DNC vice chair back in February. Then Oklahoma Democratic operative Kalyn Free filed a complaint arguing the election process “discriminated against three women of color candidates” by allowing two men to sweep both vice-chair slots. The DNC’s Credentials Committee agreed, voided the results, and forced a do-over — and Hogg, reading the room, quietly declined to run again. The most prominent young progressive in the party got bumped from his own leadership seat for being insufficiently diverse on the one axis that actually mattered to the people running the process: being white and male. That’s not a 2020 relic. That happened this year, inside the DNC’s own headquarters, to the party’s handpicked golden boy — using the exact same racial-and-gender-box-checking logic Democrats now want to pretend was a temporary lockdown hallucination.
Then there’s the WNBA, an entire professional sports league that spent the better part of this year unable to answer the single easiest question in sports: what is a woman? After Indiana Fever guard Sophie Cunningham had the audacity to say that biological men shouldn’t compete against women, the league’s response was weeks of statements about “hate, abuse and demonization” and a major meeting on women… just to come back empty-headed and empty-skulled. When two former NBA players declared for the draft specifically to force the issue, the league quietly ruled them ineligible without ever rewriting a rulebook that still just says “only players who are women are eligible.” The reason the WNBA can’t answer the question isn’t confusion: the league already let a female player transition to male mid-career and publicly celebrated it at the time. Defining “woman” now would mean admitting the gender ideology it embraced circa 2020 already broke its own rules. That’s not a relic of the past. That’s a live mess this month, in the exact institutions that never got the memo Woke 1 supposedly ended.
When the Supreme Court’s Louisiana v. Callais decision gutted the race-based-redistricting regime that had propped up dozens of “safe” congressional seats, Democratic leadership didn’t respond like a party that had grown past racial sorting. House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries went on national television and accused the Court’s majority of “unleashing Jim Crow-like tactics” and doing “the bidding of extreme MAGA Republicans,” then declared “everything should be on the table,” including “massive judicial reform”, to get race-based maps reinstated. Strip away the theater and what he’s demanding is the restoration of a system explicitly built to sort American voters by skin color. By Ballotpedia’s own count, 148 House seats nationwide — more than half of the entire Democratic caucus — currently exist in their present shape because race, not geography, dictated the lines. The sitting House Minority Leader isn’t nostalgic for Woke 1’s racial framework. He’s actively campaigning to keep it running in 2026.
Woke 1 didn’t die somewhere between the lockdown and the vaccine rollout, and it isn’t a cringe-inducing vocabulary word the party has wisely retired. It’s alive in the DNC’s own leadership fights, alive in the WNBA locker room, and alive every time the House Minority Leader demands the law keep treating Black voters and white voters as different species who need different maps. Democrats aren’t running away from Woke 1 this cycle; they’re just hoping you’ll laugh along with the branding long enough not to notice they never actually left.
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Tony Kinnett is the senior national correspondent for The Daily Signal and host of its flagship nationally syndicated radio/TV show and podcast, “The Tony Kinnett Cast.” Follow him on X @TheTonus.
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