Specter of possible 2016 repeat likely to haunt Democratic feast in Chicago

The Democratic national convention opens at the United Center, home of the Chicago Bulls, on Monday, as a renascent party embraces its new leader Kamala Harris and attempts to supercharge her bid for the White House.

Up to 50,000 visitors are expected to descend on Chicago through the week, buoyed up by a Democratic presidential ticket that is currently in the driving seat. As the Republican grandee Karl Rove put it to Fox News recently: “Donald Trump is clearly in a subordinate role here.”

But behind all the razzmatazz, and despite the upbeat made-for-TV soundbites emanating from the event stage, there will be a layer of anxiety in the air. The elephant in the arena will be the memory of what happened eight years ago to another female Democratic nominee who seemingly had the measure of Trump.

Related: Can Kamala Harris win over disenchanted Latino voters?

Few of the 5,000 delegates set to attend the Democratic national convention will have forgotten the delirious anticipation as election day dawned on 8 November 2016. Hillary Clinton was putting the finishing touches to her victory speech, to be delivered under the glass ceiling of New York’s Javits Center in a not-too-subtle representation of the barrier she was about to break as the first female US president.

The hangover of that election night party-that-never-happened endured for the next four years.

Thoughts of Clinton’s shocking defeat to Trump are probably to be kept well in the background at this week’s convention. But they may surface in many delegates’ minds given that Clinton herself is expected to speak on Monday night.

Out of the agonising experience of her loss have emerged a number of poignant lessons that Harris and her running mate, the Minnesota governor, Tim Walz, can already be seen to be heeding. Lesson one of the 2016 rulebook: avoid hubris.

The duo will be celebrating this week the forging of their new, younger leadership of the Democratic party following Joe Biden’s stepping aside. But even amid such joy – their word – they will be working hard to dodge even the slightest hint that they think the election is in the bag.

“They have got to run aggressively as if they are behind, even if the polls say that they are ahead,” said Joe Trippi, a Democratic strategist who also advises the anti-Trump Lincoln Project. “They’ve got to keep that underdog energy up – that’s a clear lesson from 2016.”

Eight years ago, Clinton made her attempt to crack the glass ceiling a central pillar of her campaign. By contrast, Harris speaks relatively little about her equally historic run as the first Black and Asian woman at the top of a major party presidential ticket, tending to lean more into her work as a “ courtroom prosecutor ” while reminding voters that Trump is a convicted felon.

For Nadia Brown, a political science professor at Georgetown University, Harris’s hesitation to put her identity front and center is a sign both of changing times and of the steep challenges that lie ahead. Being the first female president is no longer enough – it’s what you would do with it.

“For many Americans today, particularly younger Americans, the novelty of a woman, or a Black or a South Asian president, isn’t as much of a driving force to the polls as what the candidates’ policies are and how they are informed by their lived experiences,” Brown said.

In particular, many younger Democratic voters will be watching how Harris handles the vexed issue of the Gaza war, and to what extent she will detach herself from Biden’s support of the Israeli military response to Hamas’s 7 October attack that has claimed almost 40,000 Palestinian lives. “How Harris addresses the growing number of progressives who have been turned off by the Biden administration’s decisions on Gaza will be critical,” Brown said.

Brown’s research into gender and politics has shown a dramatic shift in public opinion over the past 15 years towards acceptance of women as effective political leaders. That is reflected in the surge in female lawmakers in Congress – up from 105 in 2016 to 150 today.

But Brown has found a stubborn resistance to change in public attitudes towards political chief executives – of whom the epitome is the US president – which continue to favor men. She blames such inertia on the heavily masculine language used to describe the presidency.

“The position was framed through a gendered lens,” she said. “He is the ‘father of the nation’, shepherding the country the way a father would lead a family.”

That raises an on-going danger facing Harris of what Brown calls a “cognitive dissonance”. Voters can say to themselves: “I support women leaders, but I’m still not going to vote for her as the top of the ticket.”

Another cruel lesson from Clinton’s fate was that Democratic presidential candidates ignore the Rust belt states – and especially the “blue wall” states of Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin – at their peril. In 2016, the Clinton campaign largely bypassed Michigan, assuming her 5% poll lead in the state was unassailable; Trump went on to win there by 11,612 votes.

“Every Democratic strategist knows there is no path to the presidency – none, 2016 proved this – that does not go through the three blue wall states. You’ve got to win all three,” Trippi said.

There is no danger of Harris unlearning this truth. Since she announced Walz as her vice-presidential pick, the duo have staged a campaign blitz through the rust belt including a 15,000 strong rally in Detroit. The effort has so far been rewarded in the polls, with a recent Times-Siena survey showing Harris four points ahead of Trump in all three states.

The choice of Harris’s running mate was in part likely to have been influenced by how well “Coach Walz”, with his plain-talking, midwestern ways, would play across the blue wall states and other battlegrounds such as Georgia and Nevada. “He doesn’t talk like a politician,” Trippi said. “You want to have a beer with him.”

But there’s a lesson here from 2016 too, relating to the other Tim. When Clinton chose Tim Kaine, a US senator from Virginia, as her running mate there was initial enthusiasm on theDemocratic side. But it paled after Kaine came across as over-rehearsed and “trying too hard”, as the Washington Post put it, in his debate with Trump’s vice-presidential pick, Mike Pence.

Kaine’s travails underline perhaps the biggest takeaway of all – don’t assume that the good times will last forever. That’s true in any presidential cycle, but it is especially true when the opponent is Trump.

In Trippi’s analysis, Trump is a diminished candidate compared with his standing in 2016 and 2020. His key anti-immigration and anti-crime policies sound tired, and at 78, almost two decades older than Harris, 59, he can potentially be made to appear frumpy against the Brat-tastic Democrat with her A-list celebrity surrogates such as Megan Thee Stallion.

Trump is also carrying much more political baggage than he did in either his two previous presidential races. That includes his felony conviction in a criminal hush-money scheme; the fall-out of the supreme court’s overturning of the right to an abortion; and Project 2025 , the extreme far-right manifesto for a second Trump term.

Despite all this, Trippi said, he should never be under-estimated. “Trump won in 2016 and came desperately, horribly close to winning battleground states in 2020. Even after 32 felony counts his people will still turn out to vote. That’s a haunting that is in the minds of many Democrats, and it’s not lost on anybody.”