For many Democrats, 2016 nominee Hillary Clinton's failure to defeat former President Donald Trump continues to be a vivid nightmare that they are desperate to not experience again.

Thus, it is noteworthy that Vice President Kamala Harris' campaign appears to be avoiding what was arguably one of the Clinton campaign's biggest mistakes -- taking certain critical swing states for granted and not expending sufficient time and resources there, according to National Review.

To that point, Harris has spent the past two days doing multiple events in the putative "blue wall" Rust Belt states of Michigan and Wisconsin -- states that Clinton incorrectly viewed as safely Democratic, largely ignored, and ultimately lost to Trump in 2016, likely sealing his overall victory in the Electoral College.

Three stops for Harris in Wisconsin

The Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel reported that VP Harris spent much of Thursday in Wisconsin with three scheduled events that were intended to bolster her support among key constituencies of the Democratic Party.

She actually arrived in the Badger State Wednesday evening and stayed in a famous Milwaukee hotel so that she could get an early start in the morning with an event at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, where she attempted to rally young voters while clashing with pro-Palestinian protesters who disrupted the event.

Harris then traveled to UW-La Crosse for an event, where she was joined by billionaire Mark Cuban to help deliver a message on her economic policies and was again confronted by protesters, then rounded out the day with a rally at a small auditorium holding around 4,000 supporters in the Green Bay area.

Harris with four stops in Michigan

On Friday, The Detroit News reported that VP Harris made a trio of stops for campaign events in Michigan, where she portrayed herself as the "underdog" in the race against former President Trump -- who the outlet noted made three stops of his own in the state on the same day.

The Democratic nominee's schedule included events in Grand Rapids followed by a visit to a General Motors assembly plant in Lansing, where she attempted to rally support from union workers, then ended her day with a speech in the Detroit suburb of Waterford Township.

Harris followed all of that up with a fourth event in Michigan in Detroit to mark the first day of early voting on Saturday, per the outlet, while her running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, was expected to come to the state for a pair of events Saturday night and Sunday morning.

Clinton ignored Wisconsin completely and barely visited Michigan

National Review noted that the Harris campaign's apparent focus on Wisconsin and Michigan stood in stark contrast to how the Clinton campaign handled those two critical battleground states eight years earlier.

Indeed, a 2017 Vox report on the tell-all "Shattered" book that documented the failed Democratic campaign in 2016, while observing a host of different problems for the candidate, keyed in on the complete failure to visit Wisconsin even once during the general election and how Clinton had only visited Michigan a couple of times -- even as some of her advisors, including her former president husband Bill, had urged her to pay more attention to those and other crucial states.

In the end, Trump won both Wisconsin and Michigan, as well as the third "blue wall" state of Pennsylvania, and it looks like Harris and her crew are determined to try and avoid making that same mistake of ignoring or taking for granted those important swing states.

Polls aren't reassuring to Harris campaign at this point

With less than three weeks to go until the election, VP Harris' intense focus on Michigan and Wisconsin may prove to be too little and too late, as RealClearPolling's average of polls shows that former President Trump holds modest leads, within the margin or error, in both of those plus the rest of the critical battleground states.

As for the national average, RCP shows that Harris is clinging to a shrinking 1.3-point lead over Trump, but that should be of no assurance to Harris at all, given that Clinton thought she enjoyed a 6.5-point lead over Trump -- and President Joe Biden had an 8.9-point lead in 2020 -- at this same point in those election cycles, with both of those contests ending up much closer than anticipated.