Yesterday, USA Today published the results of a new poll under the headline “A GOP war on ‘woke’? Most Americans view the term as a positive, USA TODAY/Ipsos Poll finds.” This is certainly intended as a rebuke to one GOP candidate in particular. Gov. DeSantis has on several occasions described Florida as the place where woke goes to die. The story is even illustrated with a photo of him signing the Stop WOKE act.

Republican presidential hopefuls are vowing to wage a war on “woke,” but a new USA TODAY/Ipsos Poll finds a majority of Americans are inclined to see the word as a positive attribute, not a negative one.

Fifty-six percent of those surveyed say the term means “to be informed, educated on, and aware of social injustices.” That includes not only three-fourths of Democrats but also more than a third of Republicans.

Overall, 39% say instead that the word reflects what has become the GOP political definition, “to be overly politically correct and police others’ words.” That’s the view of 56% of Republicans…

“Most Americans understand that to be woke is to be tuned in to injustices around us,” said Cliff Young of Ipsos. “But for a key segment of Republicans who make up the Trump-DeSantis base, ‘woke’ is a clear trigger for the worst of the politically correct, emerging multicultural majority.”

But today Philip Bump wrote an analysis of the poll which, to my surprise, points out the thrust of the article may be missing something pretty significant. Just because a majority of respondents define woke as being aware of social injustices doesn’t mean they agree with wokeness.

Yes, Americans are more likely to say that it refers to awareness about social justice than to say that it’s about being overly politically correct. But, at the same time, they were slightly more likely to view being described as “woke” as an insult than a compliment.

Bump created this chart showing the data USA Today results:

If you focus in on just Republicans responses to those two questions, you can spot the problem. Wokeness is considered an insult by a strong majority of GOP respondents (+46) and yet the description of what it means is more even divided with a larger majority saying it means to be informed on social justice (+19). Here’s how Bump sums it up USA Today’s mistake.

USA Today frames “being informed, educated on, and aware of social injustices” as “positive” in its headline, but many Republicans (and other Americans, certainly) don’t see that awareness as a positive. To use an over-the-top counterexample: If you ask someone what racism means, they might be able to answer correctly but that doesn’t mean they view racism positively. Republicans can know what is meant by woke and disagree that adhering to the components of wokeness is valuable. Indeed, they are 46 percentage points more likely to see “woke” as an insult than a compliment.

The same is likely true for some Independents who show a similar split between the two questions. And Bump notes that we’ve seen this sort of thing before. In 2020 a Monmouth poll asked respondents about “defund the police” the hot new trend that was sweeping the country at the time. Nearly 70% of Republicans agreed that “defund the police” meant reallocating funding, and not getting rid of the police entirely. And yet knowing this didn’t equate to agreement with the idea. There’s widespread agreement on the right and center-left that pushing “defund the police” hurt Democrats in the 2020 election.

USA Today seems to have fallen into a trap, i.e. if people only understood what the left-wing extremists meant, they’d be on board with them. But it’s not true. On the contrary, I think many on the right have a better understanding of what some of these ideas mean in practice than those on the left, which is one reason they’re more likely to oppose it. That’s almost certainly the case with “woke” which has been consistently downplayed and treated as either harmless or beneficial by most newspapers year after year. But I suspect the people who’ve read about campus cancel culture in conservative media (or simply seen a few Libs of TikTok videos) have a better understanding of it than most major newspaper editors.

Anyway, it’s not often that I agree with Philip Bump but in this case I think he got it right.