Wandering about downtown Durham, North Carolina, the last couple of days, I kept trying to figure out what it reminded me of. Eventually it came to me, in many ways, this city is a mini-San Francisco of the South, and Vice President Kamala Harris’s best chance to win the swing state.
Outside the City by the Bay, I’ve never been anywhere where Big Tech’s footprint and cultural attitudes were on such obvious display, and the 80% to 20% advantage Democrats have had here in recent elections is just another sign of it.
Durham is a veritable millennial playground, where the well-off young tech pros in their childish clothing and sneakers flit between trendy-looking restaurants that are essentially high-end Applebee’s.
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In the morning, I overheard two of them chatting on the walk to work.
"What are you doing this afternoon?" he asked. "I’m taking the gardening class," she replied. "I signed up for the hike," he shot back, and I am thinking to myself, are these people going to an actual job, or to summer camp?
Later that early evening, a frazzled but professional-looking, 30-something South Asian man rushed over to the outdoor table where I was talking to a local news reporter. He put a printed page in front of us and insisted, "Are you local? Do you know where any of these things are?"
I told him I had seen the statue of the red penguin down the street earlier. "Thank you, thank you," he stammered and ran off into the gloaming.
"That’s a grown man doing a scavenger hunt," I told my companion, shaking my head.
My first day on the streets of Durham lined with rideshare scooters, I saw no children. The next day, I saw exactly two, and frankly, that is strangely jarring.
The whole place feels vaguely like a facade, the earth tones and glass of mediocre modern architecture is swallowing up the old stone Art Deco buildings, and this is a place where paying in cash is always some kind of an issue.
On a darker note, also like San Francisco, Durham has the most aggressive homeless panhandlers I have ever seen in a small American city.
When they aren’t demanding money, you spot them sleeping on benches, or in parks, and while not overwhelming, or dangerous yet, the seeds for that are there.
All of this is to say that in Durham, I found what I believe to be the prototypical Kamala Harris voters.
In this little bubble of privilege that reminds me of the village in the 1960s TV show "The Prisoner," a seemingly nice place but somehow very fake, the Democrats' vision of turning the whole country into San Francisco seems to be working.
Why wouldn’t a 34-year-old with no kids, pulling a buck fifty in a cheap state support Harris and Democrats, especially when the companies that sign their fat paychecks, like Google, are the same ones censoring "dangerous" conservative speech day in and day out?
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By all normal economic metrics, Durham is a fantastic success story, but there are some problems with Big Tech’s version of urban development, with turning American cities into Silicon Valley campuses. One of those is that it doesn’t leave much room for the locals to thrive.
Nobody from here is graduating from a community college and getting a non-service job at Epic Games; like San Francisco, the gulf between the haves and the have-nots is glaring and vast. But that seems fine to the contented cogs in the machine that fuel Durham’s growth and Harris’s electoral chances.
Here in Durham, the company will take care of you, just as Momala Harris says she will if elected. It is a creepy feeling, like the only individualism present is in the choice of fancy footwear and handbags. The city has all the soul of artificial intelligence.
San Francisco and Durham are the places where Harris and Democrats thrive, where the top-down organization of society by corporations and the state plots out your pleasant life for you, as you grind out code and reward yourself with avocado toast.
But for many Democratic voters, especially millennials, it's not such a bad deal. They think this is the future, a childless arrested development of company hikes and scavenger hunts and ignoring the homeless.
If enough of them turn out for Harris in early November, it could be the big-tech future of all of us.
