Donald Trump’s triumph last November 5 has surprised by its forcefulness. The Republican not only won the necessary electoral votes, 312 out of 270, to be inaugurated as president, but also won 50.4% of the popular vote. Trump’s triumph was consolidated in the Senate and in the House of Representatives. What is the reason for this overwhelming victory?

The election results contravene the close election that was predicted based on the data from the various polls that were published during the campaign. Even on Election Day, the average of the polls published by The New York Times showed Trump and Harris going into the election with a difference in favor of the Democratic candidate of only one percentage point (49% vs. 48%).

However, beyond questioning whether the electoral polls failed or not, I believe that the results of the elections can be understood if we consider the link between Trump’s positions and different indicators that would show the acceptance of the opposition to diversity, equity, inclusion, the fight against climate change and gender ideology, before the electoral contest.

It is pertinent, then, to ask ourselves if the triumph of the Republican candidate can be seen as a rejection of the so-called Woke movement. This term has been used to refer to movements and all supporters/identified with the fight against climate change; racial discrimination; the promotion of the feminist agenda; the recognition of the rights of the LGTBIQ+ community and racial and sexual inclusion, all movements that achieved important advances with the support of the Democratic government recently. 

In this sense, the election results can be considered the culmination of an anti-Woke reaction that was already showing up in public opinion in two dimensions: in what was expressed in different opinion polls and surveys and in the behavior of the audiences.

In the first case, different polls published by Gallup, General Social Survey (GSS), Pew Research and YouGov, showed that racial concern would have decreased in 2024 with respect to 2021 by 13 percentage points (48% vs. 35%). According to GSS, the view that discrimination is the cause of the race gap would have peaked in 2021 and has been declining ever since. For its part, Pew Research notes in its studies that the proportion of people who believe someone may be a different sex than their birth sex has been steadily declining since 2017. While according to YouGov, opposition to trans students playing on sports teams that match their chosen gender rather than their biological sex has grown from 53% in 2022 to 61% in 2024.

The evidence provided by Ipsos is much more categorical. In March 2023, it published the study “Americans divided on whether ‘woke’ is a compliment or insult”, in which it points out that about 60% of Republicans and 42% of independent voters considered the word “woke” as an insult, while 23% of Democrats shared this perspective.

This latter data on the opinion of independents is significant, considering that the vote for Trump increased decisively in this sector in 2024 compared to 2020. According to the IPSOS report, 56% of the U.S. population considered the policy of inclusion and the censorious approach to woke policies to be excessive. This data was later confirmed by the June 2024 Data for Progress study, “Voters are Tired of the War on Woke,” which noted that 57% of Americans felt that laws limiting freedom in the name of inclusion should not be passed.

In the case of audience behavior, there is also data that can help us understand the rejection of inclusion policies, for example, Disney would have lost 889 million dollars last year in terms of the cost of its productions and the amount collected at the box office.  Considering this situation, journalist John Corrigan states that “Hollywood is beginning to question inclusion quotas due to growing public opposition”.

This brings us to the old theoretical perspective focused on analyzing the relationship between the media and audiences, the “uses and gratifications” approach, which states that media users use the media according to their interests, needs, and motivations. If we pay attention to this hypothesis and according to the data that have been presented, the results of last November 5 could be reflecting the feeling of the majority of the electorate, a feeling that has been expressed for quite some time in the use and the little gratification that the media contents would be producing.

_{*Machine translation proofread by Janaína da Silva}