To accuse Kamala Harris’ campaign of reflexively repeating the mistakes of Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign — as Jacobin’s Branko Marcetic did recently — may sound like drive-by leftist snark, carrying an unfortunate (and presumably unintended) undertone of sexism. But it also reflects a deeper and broader anxiety felt across the liberal-progressive spectrum: Polls are dead even, 10 days before what has been billed (fairly or not) as a world-historical presidential election. After the sugar-high of the Biden-to-Harris switch and the exhilaration of the Democratic convention, this is a difficult future to face.
Among the media and political classes, the operating assumption at the moment is that Donald Trump — by any normative standard, a disastrously undisciplined and erratic candidate — is likely to win that election, even without resorting to skulduggery or mob violence. That “gut feeling” has zero predictive value, to be clear, and may be nothing more than lingering PTSD from 2016.
