As the Democrats eye a political future unburdened by what has been, they can’t resist a few looks back.

While President Joe Biden’s swan song, delivered outside of primetime by a politician past his prime to a party that forced him to abandon his reelection campaign after a single disastrous debate, got most of the attention, Hillary Clinton’s shadow, if not her speech, really hangs over the whole convention.

Clinton reminded the delegates in Chicago that they would be avenging her 2016 loss if they elected Vice President Kamala Harris over the former president Donald Trump. She spoke of the glass ceiling that would be smashed to pieces, justice delayed but not denied.

“We have him on the run now,” Clinton said of Trump, the man she treated as a joke and yet remains a real political force eight years later while she can only live vicariously through Harris.

Democrats now delight in the thought of locking him up, perhaps over classified documents or January 6 or a New York hush-money case few of them could explain if their lives depended on it.

Trump is like the horror movie villain who appears to have been killed multiple times but still keeps on coming—two impeachments, the Russia investigation, the 2020 election, the Capitol riot, several indictments, and a literal assassination attempt. Gleeful Chicago Democrats are hoping this MAGA version of the Friday the 13th franchise is finally coming to an end, that Trump is without another Houdini-like escape from the trap they have set for them.

If it is the end for Trump the politician, Clinton may not have brought that outcome about. But she is around to celebrate it, as Democrats trade in her schoolmarmish demeanor for irrational exuberance. As you can see in the “Macarena”-filled footage of Democrats’ last Chicago convention in 1996, sometimes even Hillary gets to dance.

But lurking deep inside the minds of most partying Democrats is a gnawing doubt, personified by Clinton. If they are of age, they remember feeling supremely confident of beating Trump, utterly convinced that Republicans had thrown away a winnable presidential election by nominating him. The polls generally supported their bullishness about the woman they had nominated for president and her middle-aged dad sidekick named Tim.

And yet in 2016, they awoke the next morning to headlines about their defeat. It was apparent the night before that, although his margins were slim, Trump had prevailed in the battleground states that decided the election. Instead of the glass ceiling, it was the blue wall that was broken.

Harris herself knows the pain Democrats felt after losing to Trump, though her story about consuming a whole bag of Doritos is probably less representative than the images of tearful Clinton supporters or that one woman who took to her knees and wailed.

Democrats so feared a repeat of this sorrow and anguish that they switched out the sitting president of the United States after he dominated in the (admittedly uncompetitive) primaries when the polling averages showed him trailing Trump by about 3 points. (Though Biden’s worst-case scenario numbers were certainly bad for Democrats across the board.)

The question that always remained whether Trump won in 2016 because Clinton was a uniquely bad candidate. Then Democrats asked themselves whether Trump needed uniquely favorable circumstances—such as an obviously declining opponent who was asking to remain in the White House until he was 86—to win again.

In the Republican primaries, the sample size is a bit bigger. There, Trump has prevailed against some of the top political talent in the GOP. Ron DeSantis’s campaign may have been disappointing, but he isn’t Dean Phillips and Nikki Haley is not Marianne Williamson. That’s without mentioning the top tier of the 16 Republican candidates Trump beat in 2016.

Yet it is certainly true that outside the GOP, Trump is something of an acquired taste. He is the main voter mobilizer for both parties’ bases and therefore always keeps both teams in the game.

Democrats showed little hesitation in toppling the only politician who has ever won against Trump and swapping him out for a liberal woman known for her cackle. So if they see the shades of 2016 in their minds, they are not demonstrating it outwardly.

But the Hillary Clinton experience remains an indelible part of the Democratic psyche. They have to hope that this time, the party leaders telling Biden to take a pass on the race knew what they were doing.