I think DeSantis might be almost single-handedly responsible for destroying any momentum that Republicans should've had in 2022, even more than the pro-insurrection people. He basically made bullying children and opposition to the First Amendment the 2022 Republican platform. I think that might even be more off-putting to most voters than the pro-life crap.
What ,
DeSantis won a massive landslide in 2022 and was polling showed this so called controversial bill to be popular
He did, but he won the massive landslide in an uncivilized sh-thole state. Of course Floridians who say the pledge of allegiance before bingo night are going to like this crap.
As for the polls, I don't know what to say, they're just f-cking fake. I don't know how many more polls need to be wildly off before we can write off this dreadful industry.
I think this is similar to SSM where views of a movement are different from views of an issue.
"Trans Activist" and now the very term "LGBT" have started to poll poorly not because people want X law, but because they are associated with corporate HR seminars that cause millions of Americans to suffer PTSD flashbacks.
As a gay man, I now have a viscerally negative reaction to the term "LGBT+" and especially things like "non-binary" or "two-spirit" because I instantly imagine an extremely annoying white woman giving a patronizing PowerPoint.
DeSantis conflated opposition to "indoctrination" in other words the limited reality and exaggerated perceptions of the corporate diversity HR industry setting their sights on public education as a future market, with actual hostility to gays, lesbians, or trans kids. But people never had an issue with any of them. It was with the grifters who charged exorbitant consulting fees under the guise of "inclusive programing" to design lesson plans or give presentations. When he stepped beyond it, support melted away.
This kind of reminds me of why politically unattuned centrist people are much less likely to have a negative reaction to the term "woke" than center-left people who pay much closer attention.
To the former group, "woke" is some generic slur that groups like TurningPoint USA use against anything they don't like and this often just means things like "movies that star black people", they sound ridiculous so it's not surprising centrists and generally apolitical people find that.
To higher-info center-left people, it's more aligned with an extremely obnoxious brand of mostly online leftist activism that quite frankly manages to offput basically every singe person who isn't a strict adherent of that specific thing as well as corporate DEI type things and really annoying buzzwords. Nate Silver has spent much of his post-538 time decrying this despite being firmly center-left his whole career and still is. But an apolitical type or typical swing voter isn't going to know much about Robin DiAngelo or Saira Rao or any of the many anime/picrew avatars spouting similar things to care about it.
That being said, the Republicans thanks primarily to Ron DeSantis have kind of forfeited any advantage they could get from this, at least in the short term, because DeSantis basically did the same thing in the opposite direction with these type of laws, which obviously is going to scare the soccer mom type voters more than some anime avatar saying weird things about privilege. Now the Republicans are seeing as the authoritarian side in the culture war, and that side pretty much always loses. (Look at previous LGBT issues, marijuana, pornography, or even Prohibition going back that far.)
The other big factor that I think tanked the woke boogeyman was Elon Musk taking over Twitter, because even if the max exodus from the site hasn't quite happened (yet), it did deflate its overall importance and credibility, and might've encouraged a lot of the anime avatars to touch grass and evolve into normie libs (somewhat anecdotal on that, but there's evidence.) Leftist activism today can still be very obnoxious and offputting (see countless examples of Gaza protestors) but now it is in a way that seems different from ~2015-2021, and actually is just reminiscent of pre-2015ish.
