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.