Since taking over the top of the Democratic ticket, the Vice-President has closed the gap in the polls, broken fund-raising records, and given Democrats something to be excited about.

In the two weeks since Kamala Harris replaced Joe Biden at the top of the Democratic ticket, she has opened a slight lead over Donald Trump, both in the national tally and in the swing states, and, just last month, raised more than three hundred million dollars. Hours before the start of a rally in Philadelphia, on Tuesday night, at which Harris introduced Minnesota Governor Tim Walz as her running mate, the line to get in spanned several blocks. A German TV reporter preparing for a live shot outside kept saying that the crowds reminded him of Trump rallies. This week, Trump is not appearing in any swing states; instead, he met with a video-game streamer, looking faintly impatient as he was gifted a Tesla Cybertruck. Harris was striding on a runway into a roaring crowd of ten thousand, following a drumline, to Beyoncé. It has been a decade since a Democrat could match the scale of Trump’s presence. Is Harris—suddenly, at least for a moment—actually bigger than him?

It seemed that way in Philadelphia. The generic Democratic soundtrack has been updated; between political speeches, a d.j. cranked R. … B. and hip-hop from the nineties and two-thousands and exhorted the crowd. Attendees were given light-up wristbands that twinkled red, white, and blue, so whenever they clapped a patriotic shimmer swept through the crowd. In the stands behind Harris, a huge sign was displayed: “MADAM VICE PRESIDENT,” with the “vice” crossed out. The other politicians who spoke kept getting startled by the audience shouting one of Harris’s applause lines: “We’re not going back.”

“Not since Obama,” people kept saying. At a surface level, that was true. There has not been this kind of energized Democratic unity since Barack Obama’s Presidency. But at every other level the situation is different. In 2008, what was most visible about the crowds was their youth; this time, it is the overwhelming presence of middle-aged women. And where Obama pitched himself as a figure of national unity—his rallies a place where a changing country might discover itself—Harris’s events are for Democrats; the nature of the energy is not hope but a certain partisan steeliness. (We’re not going back.) By the time Harris made her way down the runway, she practically had to beat back expectations. “We are the underdog in this race,” she said, leaning down into the microphone. Watching from the floor, I wasn’t sure whether she actually believed it.

She should. Set aside the domestic polls for a moment, which suggest a hanging-chads sort of margin. This year (as my colleague Amy Davidson Sorkin has written) more people will vote across the globe than in any other time in human history. So far, two broad themes have emerged: of a general anti-incumbency (perhaps predictable after COVID) and of an expansive popular front against right-wing extremism. In the U.K., where the Labour Party was able to run on both themes, it managed a landslide, even with a somewhat uninspiring head of the ticket. But the situation in the U.S., where the Democrats bear the burden of incumbency and the Republicans the challenge of their own extremism, is more similar to France, where the results have been tenuous and split.

Of course, political professionals don’t deal in abstractions; in this deeply partisan political era, they watch for tiny shifts in long columns of generally static numbers. In the distant past of July, when Biden was still the candidate, you could call up Republican strategists and hear notes of amazement at how thin the Democratic campaign’s case was: “All they’ve got is abortion.” Even Biden’s inveighing against Trump’s threats to democracy had grown a little stale. Voters viewed him as unfavorably as they did Trump, and thought he had done a worse job at running the country. As a Republican pollster told me on Wednesday, Trump’s candidacy was being buoyed by the retrospective approval for the job he did as President—itself buttressed by a sort of nostalgia for the pre-COVID days. But voters now view Harris more favorably than they do Trump. “It’s his job approval versus her image,” the Republican pollster told me. “It’s actually a kind of philosophical question: Do people want to put the past behind them and head toward the future? Or do they want the comfort of the days before COVID?” As we got off the phone, he was strategizing about how to poll it.

The Harris of 2020 would not have been in this position. Her rhetoric was often vague, grandiose, slightly New Agey. She had a tendency to lunge toward left-wing positions that she hadn’t previously espoused and couldn’t adequately explain. Last week, she went on something of a 2020-disavowal spree, with her campaign saying that she no longer supported a single-payer health-care system and no longer wanted to end fracking, among other issues. (Even a single sharply worded question about these reversals from Jake Tapper during a debate, one Democratic operative worried to me last week, could expose her as insincere.) But Harris has been making astute moves this summer. She seemed to quickly recognize that J. D. Vance’s nomination to be Vice-President, combined with the Republicans’ Project 2025 plan, allowed the Democrats to paint Trump’s party not just as anti-democratic but as repressive. Harris has made freedom her campaign theme. (In her speeches, she now groups the freedom for kids to read the books they want and to be safe from gun violence with the freedom of women to control their own bodies—so that abortion is not just an issue but the cornerstone of a philosophy.) Would this make her a culture-issue candidate? On Tuesday, Harris seemed to anticipate the charge, saying straightforwardly, “Strengthening the middle class would be my defining goal.”

Harris’s larger burden concerns the recent past—not just hers but the Party’s. Since 2015, the Democrats have had older standard-bearers (Hillary Clinton, Biden) who have often struggled to make a compelling case for the Democratic agenda, or even to clearly convey what the Democratic agenda is. Given how disastrously the Trump Administration ended (“He froze in the face of the COVID crisis,” Walz said of Trump on Tuesday—a good line), liberals have tended to express shock or confusion that polls consistently find that voters prefer Trump’s management of the economy to Biden’s, even though the evidence suggests that Biden has a stronger record. But the problem might have been that the responsibility for explaining to voters what the Democratic Party did and why it did it ultimately fell to Biden. It is hard to repair a few years of Presidential inarticulateness in a few weeks. Harris has been left in the slightly awkward position of largely running away from an otherwise successful stretch of governing. Not once in recent weeks have I heard her utter the phrase “Inflation Reduction Act.”

In introducing Tim Walz as her running mate on Tuesday, Harris leaned hard on the Minnesota governor’s biography: his youth in a rural Nebraska farming community, his work as a teacher and football coach and the faculty adviser to his high school’s gay-straight alliance, his marksmanship and long service in the Army National Guard. As Politico’s Jonathan Martin astutely observed on Wednesday morning, Walz “may not have been wearing his sergeant’s chevrons or bearing a coach’s whistle over his neck, but his remarks made clear he intends to run on his biography and regular-bloke style and not his progressive legacy in St. Paul.” As Walz spoke in Philadelphia, Harris stood behind him, keeping an attentive eye. “Only in America,” Harris had said, conjuring Obama with some emotion, could “two middle-class kids, one, a daughter of Oakland, California, who was raised by a working mother, the other, a son of the Nebraska plains, who grew up working on a farm . . . together make it all the way to the White House.” This is an image campaign. The job in Philadelphia was to layer it with some heartland folksiness. Job done.

Everyone in politics knows how much time is left. “Ninety-one days,” Walz said in Philadelphia. “We’ll sleep when we’re dead.” In this compressed campaign, Harris has only a few moves she can make; she must get all of them right. But if she can, she also might ride this momentum through to Election Day. No wonder the Democrats are energized: the most exciting thing in politics is to see a candidate insist so fully on a future that she embodies. In Harris’s case, it is also a necessity, since the future is all she has.