Like everyone who follows this stuff, I’m a bit awe-struck by the polling shift since Vice President Kamala Harris replaced President Biden at the top of the Democratic ticket. We still don’t know what will happen on Election Day; Harris could easily lose, despite her improved poll numbers. But if she wins, one way to think about what happened will be to say that Republicans were trying to replay the wrong election.

You see, G.O.P. messaging has been quite explicitly modeled on Ronald Reagan’s 1980 campaign, when he asked, “Are you better off than you were four years ago?” Applying this approach in 2024 has always been problematic, depending as it does on voters forgetting what 2020, with its soaring unemployment and mass deaths, was really like. But it’s now looking as if this election may bear more resemblance to 1984, when Reagan won a landslide victory with the theme “Morning

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