Democrats Think Their Candidate is Running for President of Online, Again

it will always be 2016

Everything is very stupid right now.

The liberal media (that is, all media that is not explicitly branded as conservative) is really, really feeling themselves, seemingly convinced that Kamala Harris’s near-tie performance in recent polls reflects permanent strength on her part. I don’t know; it seems like this closing of the gap could largely be the result of an unprecedented one-time boost, given the strange situation we’re in. It would certainly be an exaggeration to say that most Democrats appear certain of victory in November, but many are displaying a level of exuberance that’s very hard for me to justify with evidence. This is especially true given two facts - one, we’ve seen successive presidential elections in which Donald Trump has meaningfully outperformed both pundit prognostication and polling, and two, our horrible electoral system unduly empowers a lot of voters who are not at all Harris’s core constituencies. A vote in California is not worth as much as a vote in Pennsylvania. That’s absurd, but it’s the reality, exactly the kind of reality left-leaning people ignored in 2016. They ignore it again at their own peril.

And many seem intent on remaking a core 2016 mistake: acting as though the Democratic candidate’s job is to become the President of Online rather than the President of the United States, begging Harris to devote her campaign to memes and social media, playing to people like them instead of the middle class white retirees in Wisconsin and Arizona who will actually determine this election. New York has been particularly uninspiring in this regard, producing a lot of takes predicated on the idea that the median undecided swing state voter is, well, a New York magazine subscriber. Here Jason P. Frank says that the key to victory for Harris is mobilizing “stans.” Jason, what Kamala Harris needs is white independents without college degrees in swing states. Are a lot of those in very-online fan armies? I have my doubts. In fact I suspect most of the people Harris needs the most don’t know what the fuck a stan is and don’t spend any time in the spaces where stans congregate! Here Angelina Chapin credulously covers a pro-Harris Zoom call for white women, which I’m sure is a great way to reach women married to laid-off-ironworkers-turned-Uber-Eats-drivers in the Rust Belt. Here Camille Squires talks about all the enthusiasm for Harris that’s bubbling up in Harris’s old sorority. Squires writes that “there’s little doubt that she can count on the support of the more than 360,000 women of Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority, Inc.” Well, yes, that’s true. As would Biden. I don’t think the Democrats were going to struggle to reach the Black sorority sister demographic. The weird way that a given party’s most loyal voters are often rendered the least important is another dumb element of democracy, and another fact of life.

This all reflects a pitfall that pretty much everyone falls into, but which is particularly hard to avoid when your side of the partisan divide controls most of the media: playing to those within your coalition rather than those who you might be able to drag into it. All of the winking, self-impressed meme politics going on right now are useful if you want to win the day on Bluesky but profoundly useless if you want to herd many of our dumbest voters onto the Democratic party’s pasture. If Harris is going to win, the absolute last thing she should do is to run a meme candidacy like that presided over by Robbie Mook in 2016, where Hillary’s agenda took a back seat to a never-ending procession of glamorous celebrity photo ops and a wince-inducing attempt to make the candidate into America's cool grandma. In many ways, during the 2016 general election it felt like the primary never ended for the Democrats, the party seemingly certain (as I was) that Trump could not win and Hillary determined to match Barack Obama in inspiring the base, which was simply not what she needed to be focusing on. These strategic mistakes were not the reason that Hillary lost, but they played directly into her biggest weakness, which was how her underlying unpopularity fit squarely into the perception that Democrats came from a different strata of life than swing voters. You can’t fix that by disappearing further up the ass of popular culture. (If you’re over the age of 25 and you catch yourself earnestly discussing whether something is “brat,” please find Jesus. Or heroin. Or Dianetics. Whatever it takes to change your life.)

Over at The New York Times, the constitutionally even-tempered Lydia Polgreen has been huffing the hopium as well. Her piece includes some important qualifications but falls into the same trap as so many others, allowing her hope to overwhelm her analysis. She writes, “By building her campaign around freedom, she has found what she lacked in the 2020 race: a clear, simple message that stands in stark contrast to the strange and unpopular plans laid out in Project 2025.” For one thing, the abstract concept of freedom doesn’t strike me as particularly novel or unceded territory in an American election. For another, isn’t that precisely what Harris has demonstrated she’s incapable of consistently doing - delivering clear, simple messages? On the campaign trail in 2019 and as VP, she’s demonstrated a profound tendency to fall into gaffes, sometimes legitimately earning the title “word salad.” Her infamous “I’ve been to the border” comments are indicative of many more stumbles. And yet even this weakness can be spun into a strength, if you want to badly enough. In one of the most absurd of these pieces, Amanda Hess writes that Harris’s recurring failure to articulate herself well is good, actually, because we’re in a “post-coherence” political moment. When Donald Trump incoherently rants about Hannibal Lecter, that’s a vulnerability; when Kamala Harris once again mumbles about “being unburdened by what has been,” somehow, that’s an opportunity. Because of memes, or something. Memes that the voters Democrats need won’t ever see because they don’t have bullshit email jobs where they can watch Instagram reels for six and a half hours a day.

Hess writes,

For very online members of the left who view Harris as insufficiently radical, the playfulness of her memes is protective. The ironic distance stands in for their own political distance from their new favorite candidate.

That’s nice. Quick question - what are you fucking talking about?

this stuff is so fucking condescending and weird

And then there’s the serial overestimation of the power of the Black vote. Polgreen writes, “I have found the way some white liberals talk about and even fetishize the political power of Black women condescending.” That makes two of us. And yet certain repetitive claims about the Black vote that have become holy writ among Democrats simply aren’t true. In 2016, a lot of white liberals on social media took to performatively thanking Black women for how they would save us in November. “I thank these brilliant Black queens for saving this nation from itself!” This was like-farming at its most shameless, and it’s inherently dehumanizing to talk about people like this. More to the point, it wasn’t true. Black women could not rescue the Democrats, quantitatively. Black women are a little more than 6% of the population, and Black voters have significantly lower consistent turnout rates than white. For all the talk of Black women or Black voters saving the country in 2020, the reality is that Biden sufficiently reduced Trump’s lead with white suburban voters and white voters without a college degree to win the election. Votes within a given state are fungible, so of course Black votes were important, but it’s just not true that they were determinative. And… why would we need to pretend that they were? Is that some sort of laurel we need to hand Black people? I find it all so bizarre, just more of this senseless liberal habit of acting like hype men for the concept of Black people, as if that's what fighting racism entails.

While the Black vote will be very important in Michigan and Georgia, it’s much less important in Arizona and Nevada. That's just demographics. The swing state electoral map, in the 2020s, ends up privileging certain kinds of voters. Again, this sucks and you should commit to helping to change it. Of course Black Democrats supply a tremendous amount of energy, organizing, and grassroots support. But I don’t understand this relentless insistence that Black voters are the key to Democratic victory. Pennsylvania is the single most important state in this election. It’s 80% white and 11% Black. So what am I missing here, exactly? Aren’t suburban white woman vastly more important, numerically? The reality is that the Democrats need to perform well with all kinds of voters to win, certainly including a kind of voter they have struggled to attract in recent election cycles. “Black voters are the key for the Democratic party” is just one of those things that patronizing white liberals say in lieu of securing actual progress for Black people. It’s obviously untrue. Stop mistaking the responsibility Democrats have to Black citizens for the electoral impact of Black voters. They’re not the same.

White suburban undecided voters in a half-dozen states (Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin) are probably going to cast the votes that determine this election. If you think that’s as dumb as I do, you should be as committed an opponent of the electoral college as I am. But here in the system we have, that’s who will wield the most power. However, this does not mean that Democrats have to tack relentlessly to the right to win these voters. The notion that the way you win swing voters is by pursuing a conventional definition of doctrinaire centrism simply isn’t correct. Most swing voters are not doctrinaire centrists; they aren’t doctrinaire anything. The idea that independents/swing voters are centrists, in the usual sense, is one of the most enduring myths of American politics. Most swing voters appear to hold a hodgepodge of political views that are hard to reconcile given our usual definitions; this can be frustrating, but it’s important to remember.

Unlike the average journalist, the average American is not someone who lives and breathes politics and who possesses a sophisticated and reasonably internally-consistent set of political values. Swing voters love Medicare and Social Security, which are just about the opposite of sensible, moderate programs. (They’re vast and hideously expensive and you can’t opt out of contributing to them with your tax dollars.) You have no doubt heard about the basic incoherence of the average American voter, who identifies as a fiscal conservative but who doesn’t want any government programs to be cut. And the path of a sweeping policy like the Affordable Care Act - quite unpopular ten years ago, now very popular - demonstrates a lack of steady ideological bearings for many Americans. I suspect that what matters more than moderation on government policy, which most voters don’t understand, is making voters feel that you are culturally similar to them and responsive to their needs. Retreating to internet politics is the absolute last thing we want to do if that’s the case.

You will note, for the record, that Republicans do not tack relentlessly to the left to win swing voters. Trump’s willingness to protect Medicare and Social Security after a decade of Paul Ryan’s efforts to gut them was certainly an advantage. But he was also rewarded in 2016 for not-at-all moderate stances on immigration and crime. Many prominent candidates have succeeded with maximalist takes on an aggressive foreign policy. Ronald Reagan was one of the most successful presidents ever, in the public imagination, and there was essentially nothing moderate about his policy agenda. But his vibes were immaculately comforting and grandfatherly. This is an exploitable condition in American politics, leaving the door open to far more ambitious policy efforts than a James Carville would ever allow. It does, however, mean that you have to nominate people who can win the vibes race, and it remains to be seen a) if the country has progressed enough to bless a woman for her vibes and b) if Harris in particular can overcome her bizarre digressions and exploitable San Francisco baggage to win white suburban voters in swing states. The answer may very well be yes; Hillary Clinton came very close, and her vibes could hardly have been worse. But it amazes me how confident many Democrats seem. I just don’t get it.

And the intelligentsia, for lack of a better term, seem committed to pushing the campaign into precisely the wrong direction. Hess writes, “A meme alliance has emerged between the Democratic Party’s irony-pilled leftists and its #resistance-core centrists.” Ah! Both kinds of voters! Obviously, none of that will have the slightest impact on an election that will be decided by voter perceptions of inflation, Harris’s ability to effectively campaign on abortion, and the whims of a bunch of politically-incoherent retirees in Tucson and the Phoenix suburbs. But Hess is not writing a piece about winning an election; she’s writing a piece about winning the game of social positioning among online-poisoned educated Millennials, which is the only game many people in the media seem willing to play - the game of trying to impress each other. That is not of interest to me.

Coconut tree! brat! Pokémon go to the polls! We’re all having a good time! I very much hope these people are still having a good time in November. Right now, they seem incapable of contemplating the fact that they very well might not be. I am just absolutely bamboozled at how few people in the media are currently telling their readers to rein it in a little and not get too optimistic. Harris still faces massive challenges related to the electoral map. In hindsight the failure to recognize Trump’s chances in 2016, my own failure, was a matter of putting hope above sense. And we can’t afford any more of that.