Intelligencer - The End of the Democrats’ Denial

The more camouflage Harris-Walz trucker hats I saw around Brooklyn, the greater my sense of foreboding. “Courting disaster,” I texted a colleague, half-joking, as I walked to my Fort Greene polling site on Election Day. Scanning as working class, the hats seemed to be worn exclusively by people who didn’t match that description. They reminded me of the Big Buck Hunter arcade game at a bar near the campus of my elite college, which lent wry “authenticity” to the setting and whose plastic rifles were the only kind most of us had any interest in handling. I wondered if some of the hat wearers were in on the joke or simply liked the aesthetic. But some of these people looked sincere, as though they felt the hats really reflected the campaign’s resonance with regular folks.

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