Step Away from the Memes, Madame Vice President

The liberal media 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 magazine 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.