Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis has done his best to turn the word “woke” into a stand-in for all things threatening and terrible, but a new national poll shows that a majority of Americans don’t see it his way. Woke, it turns out, has a lot of positive connotations for people across the country.

In a USA Today/Ipsos poll released this week, 56% of those surveyed said the term means “to be informed, educated on and aware of social injustices.” About 39% said it “involves being overly politically correct and policing others’ words.”

If Florida’s governor, who so triumphantly pronounced our state the place “where woke goes to die,” indeed runs for president, will his anti-woke message play on a national stage? Maybe not as well as he thinks.

DeSantis, as we all know, absolutely loves the term “woke.” He slaps it on anything he thinks could be used to stir up his base of voters, mostly white and mostly Republican, who are worried about losing their primacy in the world. For the past two years, that has been an ever-widening universe of targets: critical race theory, Disney, former Hillsborough County State Attorney Andrew Warren, school books, school board members, drag queens, a National Hockey League job fair, the NCAA, diversity training at businesses, Democrats, the New College of Florida, coursework at universities, lessons from teachers, Ben and Jerry’s ice cream and banks that dare to use socially and environmentally conscious factors for investing.

To name a few.

[Get a life, guys. Or at least get out of the office for a couple of hours. ~ Beege]