Republican candidates were annihilated in Tuesday’s off-year elections, and the party has been scrambling to explain itself – often illogically – ever since.

Ron DeSantis, for example, claimed it was because all the Republicans have moved to Florida. Rep. Lisa McClain (R-MI), said Republican voters were just too happy with how things are going to get to the polls.

But one columnist says the explanation for the blue wave is quite simple: “Woke won.”

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Republicans tried to make Virginia’s elections all about trans people. They lost everything.

In an op-ed for the SF Gate, Drew Magary explained that voters “spent eight months living in a woke-free America and collectively decided, ‘We don’t want this.'”

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He spoke directly to red states and warned, “Amid the fiery embers of a self-immolating democracy, woke staged an electoral renaissance, and now it’s coming for you.”

He proceeded to ruthlessly mock what conservatives see as the “hellish” future of an America run by liberals. “Money once used to fund Immigration and Customs Enforcement will now be used to give millennials free avocado toast. More public office positions will be held by people with names that are only hard to pronounce if you don’t spend 20 seconds learning how to pronounce them. Democratic representation will be granted to people this country usually treats like dirt. Poor people will be granted access to more affordable housing, and expanded mass transit will allow them to freely go anywhere they please, even your cul de sac in Almaden Valley! OMG PRONOUNS!”

He acknowledged that the battle is far from over, that the “unwokes” still have Republican control, and that establishment Democrats and Silicon Valley CEOs are still thwarting progress. “But I’m gonna use this day, this moment, to state the obvious,” he said, “F**k these people.”

“Because this time a year ago, I watched as American voters handed the country over to a criminal enterprise headed by a broken television set. I have spent the near entirety of 2025 watching that enterprise eat its way through this country’s federal workforce, its military, its legacy media, and even the White House itself.”

“Woke was felled by this onslaught, and outright bigotry had become the new order,” he said.

But now, Americans have voted to just be “left the f**k alone,” Magary said. Woke, he explained, is about being left alone, about doing things like driving down the street without fear of being pulled over by a gun-happy cop, and about identifying as trans without protestors showing up at your school board meeting.

“Woke, in other words, is good,” Magary wrote, and finally, Americans have begun to realize it.

He concluded: “That’s why they voted the way they did Tuesday night, and why they might be inclined to continue doing so. It was a wonderful, unifying moment in a decade nearly barren of them.” He said he hopes woke’s comeback Ieaves conservatives “triggered, and I hope no one offers you sympathy for it.”

The election results are indeed being seen as a massive rebuke to the current administration, especially considering just how unpopular the president is with the American people. MSNBC host Rachel Maddow recently explained that his disapproval rating is “higher than it was in the immediate aftermath of January 6th.”

Democratic candidates swept in everything from gubernatorial and mayoral races to judicial retention votes to state legislative elections to commission races, as well as in a historic, unprecedented ballot measure.

Analysts have said the Democrats could not have had a better night, as candidates across the country not only won their elections but, in many cases, made history. And in many races, Democrats won by such large margins that news organizations declared winners within minutes of polls closing.

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