Three months ago, the Vice-President was fighting for respect in Washington. Can she defy her doubters—and end the Trump era?

When Joe Biden called Kamala Harris on the morning of Sunday, July 21st, she was in the kitchen at the Vice-President’s residence, a turreted mansion on a hill in Northwest Washington. Harris was wearing sweatpants and a hoodie from her alma mater, Howard University. Her husband, Doug Emhoff, was in Los Angeles, but the house was bustling with relatives. She had just finished making bacon and pancakes for two grandnieces before sitting down with them to work on a jigsaw puzzle.

Biden was calling from isolation, both literal and political; he had spent the previous night socially distanced at his vacation house in Rehoboth Beach, Delaware, recovering from COVID and absorbing the reality that he had lost the confidence of the Democratic Party. Twenty-four days earlier, Biden’s addled performance in a televised debate with Donald Trump had sparked a frantic effort to replace him at the top of the ticket. On the phone, Biden told Harris that he was ending his bid for reëlection. More to the point, he said that he would be endorsing her as the Presidential nominee.

Harris was grateful—though it wasn’t clear that Biden’s support would suffice. Last year, one poll found that she had the lowest approval rating of any Vice-President since its records began. At least half a dozen other prominent Democrats—including Cabinet members and the governors of Michigan and Pennsylvania—were seen as potentially stronger contenders. During the uncertain weeks when Biden was deliberating over whether to drop out, strategists and pundits had imagined selecting a candidate through some kind of primarylike contest—composed, perhaps, of town halls and an open convention. One typical proposal warned that handing Harris the nomination without a fight would “set her and the Party up to fail.” But Harris was accustomed to facing resistance. At an event in D.C. last spring, she told the audience, “Sometimes people will open the door for you and leave it open. Sometimes they won’t. And then you need to kick that fucking door down.”

By the time Biden announced his withdrawal, that Sunday afternoon, a scramble was already under way, largely out of public view. Bakari Sellers, a former South Carolina state representative who helped Harris secure the nomination, told me that her team saw value in moving swiftly. “We weren’t going to do this bullshit that other people were asking for,” he said. In his view, an open convention was a way to “skip over Kamala.”

After Biden’s call, Harris had summoned aides to her house, and a dozen or so people gathered around a table. She sat beside Tony West, her brother-in-law and unofficial consigliere, who had served as the third-ranking official in Obama’s Justice Department. In the hours that followed, her team undertook an operation that was less an improvisation than a culmination of years spent cultivating allies, including some forty-seven hundred delegates to the Democratic National Convention.

Ever since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, in 2022, Harris’s staff had been taking greater pains to plan and track her encounters around the country—photo lines, meet and greets, and other occasions of well-managed access—with an eye toward soliciting help to mount a campaign in 2028. Now, on a radically truncated schedule, they opened spreadsheets and started making calls. Harris took the biggest names: Barack Obama, Bill and Hillary Clinton, the top Democrats in the House and Senate, and the heads of the Congressional Black Caucus, the Hispanic Caucus, and the Progressive Caucus. She talked to the leaders of major unions and to advocates for abortion rights, the environment, and gun safety. She also called potential opponents—Josh Shapiro, Gretchen Whitmer, and a handful of others. Several asked her a version of the same question: “Do you think there should be some kind of process?” Harris said that she was open to it but added, pointedly, that she was already seeking pledges from delegates. In other words, good luck with your town halls.

Not everyone signed on to her candidacy right away. Obama released a statement voicing confidence in “a process from which an outstanding nominee emerges.” The former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, the Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, and the House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries praised Biden—while conspicuously saying nothing about a successor. But, around the country, activists who favored Harris were coördinating. Mini Timmaraju, a delegate to the Convention and the head of the abortion-rights group Reproductive Freedom for All, told me, “My phone was ringing off the hook from people, like, ‘Women of color, we’ve got to stand together for Vice-President Harris. If they don’t consolidate around the Vice-President, we’re going to create trouble.’ ” Harris called Timmaraju from her table to ask her to pledge support. “I was so excited, I was, like, ‘Yes! Hell yes,’ ” Timmaraju recalled. Then, realizing that she had just shouted at the Vice-President, she added, “I’m sorry I yelled at you, Ma’am.”

By 10 P.M., the table was littered with half-eaten pizza and salad, and Harris had called more than a hundred people. Several Democrats who might have challenged her, including Whitmer, Shapiro, and Mark Kelly, the senator from Arizona, had promised their support. Aides estimated that they’d have pledges from a majority of Convention delegates within forty-eight hours. Harris was on track to be the first Democratic nominee since Hubert Humphrey, back in 1968, to secure the nomination without winning a primary. As Sellers put it, “We ended up having an open convention. It was just the shortest open convention in the history of mankind.” Harris never had time to change out of her sweats.

By the following morning, with a hundred and six days until the election, she had endorsements from a majority of Democrats in Congress, two large unions, and a growing number of state delegations. Some worried that the choice was hasty. Mike Murphy, an anti-Trump Republican strategist, tweeted, “Dems would be well advised to slow down and think this through.” The Atlantic ran an essay by Graeme Wood titled “Democrats Are Making a Huge Mistake.” The Washington Post columnist Perry Bacon told colleagues, “To be totally honest here, my worry is that it seems like Trump is likely to win.” But Harris’s allies in Washington believed that she was being underestimated, just as many of them had been. “There’s a whole universe of us in this town that nobody saw,” Timmaraju told me. “For so long, our interactions and engagements just weren’t considered relevant for political prognosticators.” She added, “Look who organized and mobilized within twenty-four hours!”

David Axelrod, who was the chief strategist for both of Obama’s Presidential campaigns, told me, “There was an argument that she would be strengthened by a competition, but she showed a mastery of the internal politics, which is one test of a potential candidate. People respond to competence, and that was a very competent operation.” He compared it to a rapid military strike. “She didn’t get handed this nomination,” he said. “She took it.”

In two days, Harris signed up more than fifty thousand volunteers. On CNN, the commentator Van Jones said, “You can do your whole career and not get fifty thousand volunteers.” By the following Monday, the number had reached three hundred and sixty thousand. There was a cascade of fund-raising video calls, organized by demographic, starting with #WinWithBlackWomen. The one arranged for white women—“Karens for Kamala,” as one organizer joked—broke the record for history’s biggest Zoom. In Florida, at the Villages, a retirement community known as a pro-Trump stronghold, Harris supporters staged a parade that an organizer on the scene solemnly called the “largest golf cart caravan for a Democratic candidate in nearly a decade.”

Harris’s sudden arrival at the forefront of American politics summoned the prospect that, as John F. Kennedy put it in 1961, the “torch has been passed to a new generation.” But it also evoked a less often cited part of Kennedy’s formulation—his description of Americans as “tempered by war, disciplined by a hard and bitter peace.” In the past eight years, Democrats, like the rest of the country, have witnessed too much tumult—Trump, Charlottesville, COVID, George Floyd, January 6th, the end of Roe—to expect easy success.

Annette Gordon-Reed, a Harvard law professor and historian, watched the surge of enthusiasm and was reminded of the power of contingency—the politically crucial alchemy of timing, biography, and context. She told me, “The electorate was perfectly positioned to accept an individual who could be portrayed as a harbinger of the new when lots of people were feeling stuck, as if our politics would be nothing but unbridled nastiness from now on.”

Yet Harris treated the moment gingerly. Unlike Obama, she did not give a big speech on race; unlike Hillary Clinton, she didn’t dress in the white of Seneca Falls. Since Clinton ran in 2016, the number of female governors has doubled; some six hundred more women now sit in state legislatures. Harris, though, trod so carefully on matters of identity that at times one could lose sight of the fact that a woman descended from Jamaican and Indian immigrants, and married to a Jewish man, was being regarded as a plausible candidate for the Presidency. “Harris doesn’t emphasize it, but her appearance alone carries the message,” Gordon-Reed said. “Something has changed in this country when a person like her can be in this position. That is inspiring to many people. Of course, to a substantial segment of the population, it is alarming. And we see where the alarm about having had a Black President has taken us.”

By gaining the nomination so late, Harris spared herself the obligation of courting the orthodox wing of her party in primaries. But a short run has risks; it left her little time to explain what she believes and what she would do in office. Temperamentally, she preferred to disgorge policy points than to explore her thinking with reporters. Early focus groups showed that voters had only vague impressions of her, and Republicans were racing to shape them, calling her a “D.E.I. hire” and “Comrade Kamala.”

In fact, Harris has never been a favorite of the left, and progressives in Congress, such as Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, had fought to keep Biden in the race, assuming that a Harris Administration would not give their priorities as much attention. For as long as Harris has been in politics, she has been motivated less by ideology than by a practical ambition to widen the perimeter of power, to make insiders out of outsiders—including, not incidentally, herself. Rather than try to upend the system, she has vied to run it.

As the campaign enters its final weeks, neither Harris nor Trump has a decisive advantage. She is ahead by roughly 2.5 per cent nationally, but it’s not clear that the margin is wide enough to win the Electoral College. (Democrats have secured the popular vote in seven of the past eight Presidential elections, but lost the electoral vote, and the White House, in two of them.) Harris is desperately trying to hold together an anti-Trump movement that sprawls from “Cheney to Chomsky,” as Maurice Mitchell, the national director of the Working Families Party, told me. “Her challenge is to make sure that none of the factions flee,” he said, “and, at the same time, to win over new people.”

Harris relied on friends and allies to secure the nomination, but she will need a coalition of strangers to win the election. Ron Klain, who worked alongside Harris as Biden’s chief of staff, suspected that the result would come down to what he called “the stretch of I-76 that goes from Philadelphia to Pittsburgh.” It’s full of small former steel towns, home to older white voters who helped Biden defeat Trump in 2020. There are places like that all over Michigan and Wisconsin, Klain added: “Her ability to make those people comfortable, and hold on to those people that Biden had, is going to be critical. Familiarity is very important. It hasn’t been a part of her brief until now, and it has to become one.”

Until Harris seized the nomination, she was fighting for basic respect. During the G.O.P. primaries, Nikki Haley roused audiences by saying that the prospect of a Harris Presidency “should send a chill up every person’s spine.” Republicans mocked Harris’s laugh and the Old World aphorisms she got from her mother. (A ubiquitous clip showed her channelling a maternal scolding: “You think you just fell out of a coconut tree?”) The left-leaning media were hardly kinder. In May, “The Daily Show” excerpted some of her moonier comments, such as “It is time for us to do what we have been doing.” To explain her oblique style, the show conjured Harris’s “Holistic Thought Advisor,” who described her manner of speaking as “a work of modern art that you look at and go, ‘I wonder what that was all about.’ ”

But, in the first two months of Harris’s candidacy, her favorability rating soared. The most promising poll, by NBC, showed a gain of sixteen points—the biggest jump for any politician that the network had recorded since the country rallied around President George W. Bush after the attacks of September 11, 2001. The awkward tendencies that her opponents had mocked turned out to be a significant part of her appeal. “She seems like a politician I could sit down and have a laugh with,” one fan known for impersonating her on TikTok declared. Things that had seemed like political handicaps became evidence of authenticity: her fondness for dull statistics and Venn diagrams, her disregard for what she called “lovely speeches,” her disdain for introspective questions about her “moment.”

At fifty-nine, Harris is only four years younger than Barack Obama, but she has arrived at a time when voters, especially young ones, are less patient with the sheen of politics, with figures who seem just out of reach. Instead, they want a performance of approachability—what the sociologist Julia Sonnevend, in her recent book, “Charm,” calls “personal magnetism that rests on proximity.” It’s a method exemplified by Jacinda Ardern, New Zealand’s young Prime Minister, whose Facebook page, Sonnevend writes, “presented vulnerability and mistakes as features rather than as bugs.” As Harris reintroduced herself to the public, fans collected indicators of normalcy: clips of her hamming it up with kids in a marching band, cooking videos of her cracking eggs (“one-handed!”), stories about her supplying jasmine-scented candles as parting gifts to guests at the Vice-President’s residence.

For months during Biden’s campaign, focus groups and polls had suggested that voters liked the Party’s ideas but not its candidate. A former White House official told me, “Groups would do this testing—on the ‘freedom agenda,’ on shrinkflation—and voters would say, ‘That’s what Democrats should be saying!’ And it was, like, ‘Oh, God, that is what he’s saying.’ But they didn’t want to hear it from him, because they thought he was too old.”

Where Biden failed to garner support for his “freedom agenda”—“the freedom of choice, the freedom to have a fair shot”—Harris made it personal, anchored in her impassioned defense of abortion rights, in ways that Biden, the conflicted Catholic, never could. And she was able to take on other issues that bedevilled Biden, even if the details had scarcely changed; she hewed closely to his language on Israel and the Middle East, but some members of the pro-Palestinian left were more inclined to give her the benefit of the doubt. (The activist Abbas Alawieh told Politico that Harris “conveyed more sympathy for the plight of civilians in Gaza than President Biden did at any point.”) The former White House official told me, “She feels culturally more relevant, so it clicks. Look, that’s politics.”

On July 30th, Harris visited Atlanta for the first major rally of her campaign. Four years earlier, Georgia had given Biden a narrow win, but recently it seemed to be swinging back toward Trump; Biden’s campaign had already started to turn its attention to the Midwest. Still, some ten thousand supporters crowded into the basketball arena at Georgia State University. Harris belongs, barely, to the first generation to grow up with hip-hop on the radio, and the influence showed; a d.j. played Fast Life Yungstaz’ “Swag Surfin’ ” and Kendrick Lamar’s “Not Like Us.” When the rapper Megan Thee Stallion and her backup dancers took the stage, a banner unfurled in the crowd with the words “Hotties for Harris.” An m.c. told the attendees to pick five people from their contacts, take a selfie, and “show them where you are!” I noticed a woman hobbling on a plastic boot. Her name was Kim Amis, and she had a broken ankle. She’d waited for eight hours, in line and on the arena floor, to hear Harris speak. But, she said, as a Black woman who never thought she’d see the day, “even with the boot, I had to be here.”

Harris stepped onstage, relaxed and beaming. She stands just over five-four but looks a bit taller, thanks to heels and a habitual mode of self-presentation that she calls “chin up, shoulders back.” The particulars of her speech were less memorable than the mood in the arena. (She has little patience for rhetorical flourishes, which she dismisses as better saved for a “beautiful sonnet.”) For the first time in months, Democrats were not just campaigning against Trump; they were campaigning for someone. As important, voters seemed pleased to have the focus turned back on them. Harris made her case in the first-person plural, with little in the way of “I” and “me.” She told the crowd, “When we fight, we win,” and they chanted, “We’re not going back!”

In the past eight years, Democrats have spent much of their time consumed by what the late political theorist Judith Shklar called “the liberalism of fear.” As a child, Shklar fled Hitler and Stalin, and she became convinced that liberals’ crucial task was to restrain the worst manifestations of cruelty. But constant fear is exhausting, and Harris thrilled the crowd in Atlanta by taunting Trump for threatening to back out of a debate with her. She cocked an eyebrow and deployed a line that her speechwriters had surely imagined spreading online: “If you’ve got something to say, say it to my face!”

Biden had occasionally indulged in schoolyard gibes at Trump, but mostly his campaign insisted on the high seriousness of the moment; his ads hinged on a husky-voiced elderly man warning of the death of democracy. Trump, meanwhile, treated the prospect of autocracy as a big joke, and his supporters laughed along. Harris’s campaign has tried to reclaim the punch lines. Before one of Trump’s press conferences, at his golf club in Bedminster, New Jersey, it released a statement titled “Donald Trump to Ramble Incoherently and Spread Dangerous Lies in Public, but at Different Home.” In Atlanta, as Harris reduced Trump from a figure of historic menace to the butt of wisecracks, it called to mind a line from George Orwell: “Every joke is a tiny revolution.”

As a candidate, Harris often asks to be seen as a “joyful warrior.” Longtime colleagues and observers will tell you that her rise owes more to the warrior side. At a recent rally, as she and Oprah Winfrey sat facing each other in talk-show-style armchairs, Winfrey noted with surprise that Harris had described herself as a gun owner. “If somebody breaks into my house, they’re getting shot,” Harris replied. Laughing, she added, “I probably should not have said that, but my staff will deal with that later.”

Kamala Devi Harris was reared mostly by her mother, Shyamala Gopalan, who came alone to America when she was nineteen years old. Born in Chennai, Gopalan had applied to the University of California, Berkeley, without telling her parents. She arrived in 1958, long before the recent wave of Indian immigration, and racism was routine. As Harris wrote later, her mother was “treated as though she were dumb because of her accent” and “followed around a department store with suspicion.” But Gopalan had an unshakable sense of self-worth. “We are Brahmins, that is the top caste,” she told SF Weekly in 2003. “My family, named Gopalan, goes back more than 1,000 years.” Meenakshi Ahamed, the author of a forthcoming book on Indian Americans, notes that many prominent figures—Indra Nooyi, the former C.E.O. of PepsiCo; Vivek Ramaswamy, the conservative gadfly—have Brahman heritage. It “inoculated them from the negativity,” she told me. “They held their heads high. If kids encountered discrimination, parents would tell them, ‘Just get ahead.’ ”

Gopalan had grown up during India’s fight for independence, and in Berkeley she was drawn to the Black community and the freedom struggle. “It was the foundation of her new American life,” Harris wrote in her 2019 memoir, “The Truths We Hold.” Gopalan joined the Afro-American Association, an influential study group that met to discuss apartheid, liberation movements, and the history of racism in America. Its members went on to introduce the holiday of Kwanzaa and to advocate for the creation of Black-studies departments; two young participants, Bobby Seale and Huey Newton, founded the Black Panther Party.

During a meeting in 1962, Gopalan was impressed by a charismatic speaker: a tall, dapper Jamaican doctoral student named Donald Harris. According to an essay that he wrote about his heritage, Harris was descended from enslaved people and from an Irish slaveholder, Hamilton Brown; like Gopalan, he had grown up under British colonial rule. He was an early exponent of the study of inequality, and eventually became the first Black economics professor to get tenure at Stanford. “He was a very rigorous teacher,” Ajay Chhibber, a former student, told me. “A very imposing figure in the classroom.” The Stanford Daily once wrote that he was known as “a pied piper leading students astray from neo-classical economics.” Gopalan, for her part, completed a Ph.D. in nutrition and endocrinology and specialized in the study of breast cancer.

Donald and Shyamala married in 1963, and Kamala was born the year after that; her sister, Maya, followed in 1967. As a kid, Harris was brought to protests in a stroller—she has dim memories of a “sea of legs moving about”—and she developed an image of herself as a protector. Stacey Johnson-Batiste, a kindergarten friend, remembered a day when a little boy broke her art project, a piece of pottery. Harris “jumped in between him and me, and said some words that made him so mad that he picked up a rock or piece of that hardened clay and hit her,” she told me. Harris got a cut above her eye, which left a scar that’s still visible.

By the time Harris was five, her parents had “stopped being kind to one another,” she later wrote. Shyamala filed for divorce in 1972, and won custody of the girls. Donald, outraged, wrote that the State of California had taken away his children on the assumption that “fathers cannot handle parenting (especially in the case of this father, ‘a neegroe from da eyelans’).” The girls saw him during summers and weekends, but Harris rarely speaks of him now. “My father is a good guy, but we are not close,” she once told SF Weekly. Donald has been even more reticent, making only a few public comments as his daughter gained prominence. In 2019, a radio host asked Harris if she had smoked pot, and she said she had, joking, “Half my family’s from Jamaica.” Her father responded, in an online statement that was later deleted, that his ancestors were “turning in their grave” to see the “family’s name, reputation and proud Jamaican identity” connected with a “fraudulent stereotype of a pot-smoking joy seeker.”

After the divorce, Harris’s mother focussed on raising “confident, proud Black women,” as Harris put it, with a strong strain of social justice. Harris entered a voluntary busing program that sent her to a predominantly white school, but the family stayed close to members of the Afro-American Association and sometimes attended a Baptist church. At age thirteen, after moving to Montreal for her mother’s research, Harris protested with her sister in front of their apartment building because it had banned children from playing on the lawn. (The policy was changed.)

When Harris talks of the origins of her interest in government, she lingers on a moment from her time in Montreal: a friend from Westmount High, Wanda Kagan, was being physically and sexually abused at home, and Harris’s mother took her in. “A big part of the reason I wanted to be a prosecutor was to protect people like her,” Harris has said. In subtler ways, she was coming to see government as an arena where the powerful encounter the weak, bringing either aid or harm. She observed her mother—a small, watchful immigrant—grow nervous around people in uniform. Passing through customs, she’d snap at her daughters, “Stand up straight. Don’t laugh.”

After five years in Canada, Harris enrolled at Howard, where she studied political science and economics. Though she protested apartheid, she maintained some distance from the most extreme activists. She carried a briefcase on campus, interned at the Senate and the Federal Trade Commission, and joined Alpha Kappa Alpha, America’s oldest Black sorority, which prides itself on grooming leaders.

She graduated in 1986, then returned to California, to attend Hastings College of the Law. When she told relatives that she planned to be a prosecutor, they were dubious. The family story centered on “demanding justice from the outside,” she wrote in her memoir. But she had come to see herself as something else—a figure with dual loyalties, an ally embedded in the establishment. She wrote, “When activists came marching and banging on the doors, I wanted to be on the other side to let them in.”

San Francisco politicians—the ones who actually get elected—tend to be more practical than the hippieish caricature of the place suggests. To win, they must manage progressive activists, old-money centrists with real-estate fortunes dating back to the gold rush, and new-money libertarians in Silicon Valley. When Biden was campaigning for the White House in 2020, Pelosi, one of the city’s most powerful figures, cautioned him about moving too far left. She said, “Let us win, O.K.?”

As Harris rose through the political establishment, she developed a politically inclusive maxim, “No false choices,” which she cites so frequently that aides once got it printed on stress balls to keep around the office. Louise Renne, who served as San Francisco’s city attorney for fifteen years, told me that successful leaders there had to figure out, “between the left and the right and in between, what’s going to work?” In 2000, she interviewed Harris for a job overseeing civil cases involving children. “When you’re talking about child abuse or neglect, you have to be tough,” Renne said. “But, on the other hand, I needed somebody who was kind and compassionate.”

After two years working for Renne, Harris decided to run for district attorney, and she asked a Democratic operative named Rebecca Prozan to manage her campaign. Prozan recalled an early meeting in which she asked Harris about her name recognition: “I said, ‘Have you done any polls?’ And she said, ‘Yeah, I’m at eight per cent.’ ” Prozan thought, What am I supposed to do with that? But Harris believed that she could split the ideological difference between her two opponents. “She was running up the middle, where it’s always hard to define oneself,” Prozan said. “But she was taking the angle that the office needed a professional prosecutor—meaning no more politics.”

Harris opened her campaign headquarters in Bayview-Hunters Point, a neglected former shipyard, but cultivated donors and volunteers in wealthy Pacific Heights—a world that she had navigated since the mid-nineties, when she dated Willie Brown, the speaker of the California Assembly. Her relationship with Brown, who was thirty years her senior and separated from his wife, has been a blessing and an “albatross,” as she put it. He introduced her to San Francisco’s political élite, but her opponents have tried to discredit her by saying that Brown launched her career. (Brown, who is now ninety, has pointed out that he aided most of San Francisco’s major politicians during their ascent, including Pelosi, Dianne Feinstein, and Gavin Newsom.)

Harris won the race, partly by avoiding being tagged as either too stringent or too lenient. (She later produced a book-length case for her ideas titled “Smart on Crime.”) But at times her approach left her politically isolated. Barely three months after she took office, a police officer was killed on patrol, and she announced that she would not seek the death penalty, citing a principled objection to capital punishment. Police took to shunning her, turning their backs when she passed. At the officer’s funeral, where Harris sat in the front row, Feinstein gave a speech that criticized her position. Thousands of policemen stood to applaud.

Eventually, though, Harris won support from law-enforcement groups for her commitment to locking up violent offenders; she described public safety for marginalized neighborhoods as a “civil right.” She staffed the D.A.’s office with people from the neighborhoods that were most familiar with the impact of both crime and punishment. One of her recruits, Lateefah Simon, a young community organizer, initially balked at working for a prosecutor. Simon recalled, “She’s, like, ‘If you want to spend the rest of your life holding a bullhorn, begging me to do the right thing, fine—I’ll listen to you. But you can also be on the other side of the table.’ ” When Simon showed up on her first day dressed in a Puma sweatsuit, Harris ushered her to a wall of photos of previous district attorneys—all white, all male. “She tapped her finger on her own photo, and she said, ‘Lateefah, you see what’s going on here? Folks in our community are going to want me overnight to shift this system to one that is fair. This is why you’re here. We’re going to chip away at what’s rotten.’ And then she says, ‘And don’t you ever come to this office dressed in sweatpants. I want you to be respected.’ ” When Simon came back the next day, Harris handed her a shopping bag containing a new business suit.

When Harris became state attorney general, in 2011—in an election so close that the San Francisco Chronicle mistakenly called it for her opponent—she showed a canny sense of political theatre. She downplayed her ties to liberal Berkeley by calling herself a “daughter of Oakland.” (She was born in an Oakland hospital and moved to the city in her twenties.) In 2013, when the Supreme Court ruled to recognize same-sex marriage and the first ceremonies were performed at San Francisco City Hall, Harris made a point of arriving on foot, to echo a famous picture of Thurgood Marshall beside an Alabama courthouse during a segregation case.

As attorney general, she made perhaps her deepest mark in 2012, during a national reckoning with foreclosure practices during the financial crisis. Five big banks proposed state-by-state settlements, but Harris rejected the offer for California. Valerie Jarrett, a friend and a former Obama adviser who was briefed on the negotiations, recalled, “She just kept saying, in a very calm and deliberate voice, ‘We can do better. They should be held accountable.’ ” Though Harris’s position irritated some officials in the Treasury Department, which was eager to resolve the issue, she resisted—and was joined by Beau Biden, her counterpart in Delaware, who introduced her to his father. The banks acquiesced; instead of four billion dollars, California got twenty billion.

In 2016, she won a seat in the U.S. Senate. That same night, Trump’s surprise victory scrambled political futures across the country. Harris was no longer heading to Washington to work alongside the first woman President and start building a national reputation. Instead, she arrived in a place that was fiercely divided by Donald Trump.

In a political battleground, Harris’s scrappiness was an advantage. She was lauded for prying accidental truths from Senate witnesses. During confirmation hearings for William Barr, Trump’s Attorney General, she asked if the President or his aides had ever “suggested that you open an investigation of anyone.” Barr looked forlorn, like a basset hound with a hurt paw, and sought refuge in quibbling over what she meant by “suggested.”

At a time when identity had become central to the Democrats’ political project, Harris was the second Black woman to serve in the Senate and the first South Asian person to do so. On the Judiciary Committee, she sat next to Cory Booker, of New Jersey, and Mazie Hirono, of Hawaii; Harris nicknamed their trio the P.O.C.s. Hirono told me that a constituent contacted her office to ask if they had been forced to sit together: “We said, ‘No, that’s because we are the most recent additions to that committee.’ But that gives you an idea of how long it took for P.O.C.s to be on that committee.”

Harris had barely settled in when the next Presidential race began. She launched her campaign in January, 2019, before a crowd of more than twenty thousand. But, almost immediately, she struggled to specify her positions on polarizing issues—health care, immigration, defense, the environment. She tried using her old slogan, “No false choices,” but it came off as vague and calculating. As Democrats called to reduce prison populations and to address racial disparities in criminal justice, she described herself as a “progressive prosecutor,” but her record didn’t really match the mood. “You got the sense that she ran because she could, but that her advisers told her, ‘Just take a left turn everywhere and you’ll get to where you want to be,’ ” David Axelrod said. “She did not sound connected to the words she was speaking, and that is deadly in a race for President.” Bakari Sellers, a co-chair of the 2020 campaign, told me that the mistake was trying to shape the candidate to suit the discourse. “We bubble-wrapped her and didn’t give the world a chance to see who she is,” he said. “It was a campaign that listened to social media, really. I think the misdiagnosis was ‘Twitter is real life.’ ” Harris dropped out before the Iowa caucuses.

Biden had promised to choose a woman as Vice-President, but there were other strong contenders: Senator Elizabeth Warren, Governor Whitmer, and Susan Rice, the former national-security adviser. Only seven of the forty-odd members of the California Democratic delegation had endorsed Harris; some of her fellow-officials considered her a ruthless operator. A number of Biden’s confidants were bothered that she had attacked him during the debates, for opposing busing programs decades earlier. Ron Klain saw that as an asset, though. “My view was, That’s what debates are for, and it shows her skill as a candidate,” he said.

Prospective running mates are expected not to lobby too avidly, but Harris “worked her phone incessantly, speed-dialing officials and donors close to Biden,” according to the book “Lucky,” by Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes, on the 2020 campaign. She had notable advantages: three statewide election victories, experience managing a department of justice with forty million people under its remit. Also, the congressman James Clyburn, of South Carolina—who had given Biden the endorsement that rescued his campaign—had taken to saying that picking a Black woman would be a “plus.” (Activists were blunter: they circulated a video in which Black women, recalling that Biden had promoted harsh anti-crime bills, told him, “You owe us.”) Privately, Biden had a pollster test the top names. Harris came out best. A prominent Democrat told me, “Biden chose her for specific political reasons at the moment. He was a nearly eighty-year-old white moderate who was trying to win over a party in the post-Floyd frenzy.”

Biden had sometimes felt slighted during his own years as Vice-President, and in the White House he took pains to involve Harris. “Even when he might’ve been frustrated from time to time with a direction she wanted to go, he was always very attuned to making it understood in the building that he viewed her as a partner,” the former official said. Biden gave her a portfolio much like the one that he’d had, which included working to expand voting rights and to address the root causes of immigration from Central America.

But both issues had become far more intractable than when Biden had first approached them. During the Trump era, Republicans had ramped up efforts to restrict voting, and worsening conditions in Central America had steadily driven more migrants toward the United States. Also, Harris had to cast tiebreaking votes in the Senate, limiting her ability to travel. When she pointed out these complications, though, she sometimes sounded defensive or evasive. In June, 2021, the NBC anchor Lester Holt asked why she hadn’t visited the border. Harris threw up her hands and said, “At some point, you know, I—we are going to the border. We’ve been to the border.” Holt noted that she had not, and she replied, “And I haven’t been to Europe!” The performance was widely criticized, and her relationship with the press has never fully recovered. During the campaign, she often swats away even obvious questions as petty or confusing.

Franklin Foer writes in the 2023 book “The Last Politician,” on the first years of Biden’s Administration, that Harris “didn’t want to work on women’s issues or anything to do with race. She wanted her office to be majority female—and to have a Black woman as chief of staff.” The office, stocked with a number of aides who were new to her, acquired a reputation for dysfunction. In the first eighteen months, Harris parted ways with her chief of staff, her communications director, her domestic-policy adviser, and her national-security adviser.

Former staffers recalled that, while she could be a warm, familial presence, she could also be withering. Admirers describe her stringency as an expression of high standards. Lateefah Simon, her employee in the D.A.’s office, told me, “You don’t ask anybody in the armed services if their boss is sweet and nice. Their boss has a charge to create excellence.” The former White House official told me, “It always read to me as her insecurity. ‘I haven’t prepared as much as I feel like I should have on this, and if I just come out swinging you’ll think I’m tough and smart.’ Men generally get away with that way more. Biden does it, too.”

Under pressure, Harris had the habits of a streaky point guard: good performances led to good performances, bad ones to bad. As headline writers asked whether the Democrats had a “Kamala problem,” she second-guessed herself and worried that she would make mistakes. Yet Harris also showed an aptitude for building alliances within the Party. She didn’t deflect critiques onto Biden or distance herself from him as his approval ratings sank. She seemed aware, as Valerie Jarrett put it, that “the Vice-President is there to be an adviser, to be a surrogate, not to take credit for anything.”

Behind the scenes, Harris pressed the Administration to talk to people who were usually overlooked. In April, 2021, a jury was preparing to deliver a verdict on Derek Chauvin, the police officer who knelt on the neck of George Floyd, and the White House braced for civil unrest if he was found not guilty. In meetings, Harris poked holes in the plans for a response: “Have you thought about this? Have you talked to this person?” One attendee recalled, “She was very thoughtful about who was going to need to feel like they had been part of how we arrived at these decisions.” In ways that became clear later, Harris affected some of Biden’s most consequential choices: persuading him to aid voting-rights legislation by backing an exception to the Senate filibuster rule; lobbying to nominate Ketanji Brown Jackson to the Supreme Court. Harris also sought out the counsel and friendship of Michelle Obama, one of the Party’s singular stars—“quite wisely, in my opinion,” Jarrett said, adding, “They clicked.” Michelle, who largely disdains politics, would provide an unusual degree of public support.

By the summer of 2022, Harris’s office had stabilized under a new chief of staff, Lorraine Voles, a former aide to Al Gore and Hillary Clinton. Harris had adopted a pragmatic openness to issues around race or gender: her identity, rather than confining her, could give her credibility to fight for the Administration’s agenda in public. In May, the leak of a decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization had shown that the Supreme Court intended to end the constitutional right to an abortion. The next night, in a blistering speech, Harris said of Republicans, “How dare they?”

Her aides saw an opportunity. Klain told her, “I think you’re uniquely qualified to travel the country and be a spokesperson on this issue.” He recalled, “It wasn’t a hard sell. She was there already.” In the year after the Dobbs decision, she held abortion-related events in sixteen states. In St. Paul, Minnesota, she became the first Vice-President to visit an abortion clinic. (It was during this visit that she got to know Governor Tim Walz, who later became her running mate.) She arranged the first White House meeting of abortion providers. She also started pulling together politicians, union heads, and activists from a wide range of liberal causes, sometimes at her residence, urging them to pool assets and techniques. She often used a visual aid—one of her favored Venn diagrams—to show that states seeking to narrow the right to abortion were also narrowing access to voting rights and same-sex marriage.

In April, 2023, Harris made a last-minute trip to Tennessee to meet with young Black lawmakers who had been expelled from the Republican-controlled General Assembly, for protesting in favor of gun control after a school shooting. In an impassioned speech, she linked gun violence to broader threats against freedom, saying that a democracy must insure that “children should be able to live and be safe.” Representative Clyburn, watching the talk, sensed a change in Harris’s standing. “In the middle of that speech,” he later told an audience, “I said, ‘She has arrived.’ ”

Republicans responded to Harris’s sudden candidacy with a panicky barrage of insults. In September, Trump told a rally in Las Vegas, “She’s a Marxist, communist, fascist person.” Senator Lindsey Graham called her policy ideas “batshit crazy.” Tucker Carlson compared her to the Cambodian dictator Pol Pot.

But the invective obscured a salient truth: many people were still unclear about where Harris stood on some of the central issues. As President, she would have to grapple immediately with hard problems—the economy, the border, China, Russia, the Middle East. Would her positions owe more to Biden or to Berkeley? A former Obama Administration official, now in finance, told me that his firm spends tens of thousands of dollars a month on lobbyists and consultants, and yet with “all these fancy-pants people, former members of Congress, nobody can tell me conclusively what she believes about anything.”

As the Harris campaign got under way, she renounced progressive goals that she had endorsed in 2019: Medicare for All, a ban on fracking, decriminalizing illegal border crossings. She now called herself a pragmatic prosecutor, rather than a progressive one. Four years after talking of “reducing the defense budget and redirecting funding to communities in need,” she vowed to maintain the “most lethal fighting force in the world.” Her allies frame her redrawn positions as evidence of an education in political realism. “She has learned that you can explore the ideals, and you can talk about them and their merits, but at the end of the day you have to be where people are,” Sellers told me. “For me, that’s not a flip-flop. That’s fucking leadership.” Another way of putting this is that she is trying to win an election.

When pressed, Harris said that her “values have not changed,” but hinted that her constituency had. She said on CNN that after “travelling the country extensively” she had come to believe that “it is important to build consensus.” Harris had been a centrist in California, and now she was trying to be a centrist in national politics. To address immigration, she wanted to revive a bipartisan border bill that Trump had killed; on trade, she was inclined to keep existing tariffs on China, which had been initiated by Trump and continued by Biden, but she rejected Trump’s new call for blanket tariffs on foreign imports.

When I asked Janet Yellen, Biden’s Treasury Secretary, about Trump’s effort to portray Harris as a radical, she said, “There’s nothing fringe or out there or Marxist about her view of the economy.” Yellen has worked with Harris to promote business development among poor and minority populations, and she recalled that Harris cited her mother’s experience as a single parent in arguing to make child care less expensive. “The entire child-care system just doesn’t work,” Yellen said. “There are chronic costs that have weighed on families and made it almost impossible to lead a middle-class life.”

Much of Harris’s policy agenda sounded like something you might have heard from Biden, whom a White House colleague once described to me as a “weathervane for what the center of the left is.” Unlike Biden, though, Harris has made overtures to the business world. In California, she often took positions favorable to big constituents—Apple, Meta, Alphabet—on issues around innovation and labor practices. When her plan for a federal ban on price gouging was rejected by economists as unworkable, her advisers downplayed the idea. And she said that she would pare back Biden’s plan to tax capital gains at higher rates. That move infuriated Morris Pearl, the founder of Patriotic Millionaires, which advocates for higher taxes on the rich. In a statement, he faulted Harris for “capitulating to the petulant whining of the billionaire class.”

It’s easy to imagine that Harris welcomed the criticism; eight weeks before the election, a poll found that nearly half of voters considered her “too liberal.” Harris has declined to comment on some of the most divisive business issues, such as antitrust policy, leaving her full vision just vague enough to maintain her coalition. Mark Cuban, the investor and television personality, told his social-media followers that Harris was “more supportive of entrepreneurs than any candidate in a long time.” Goldman Sachs calculated that her plans would be better than Trump’s for growth, inflation, and the budget deficit. Within six weeks of announcing her candidacy, she had matched Trump on the crucial polling question of whom voters trust more to handle the economy.

In August, Harris was greeted with the biggest rally crowd of the campaign: fifteen thousand people, jammed into an airport hangar in Detroit. She was midway through her routine—reminding the crowd that, as a prosecutor, she knows “Donald Trump’s type”—when hecklers started shouting, “Kamala, Kamala, you can’t hide, we won’t vote for genocide!” Michigan is home to one of America’s largest Muslim communities, and in the primaries Biden’s support for Israel’s war in Gaza had led to the worst performance there for an incumbent Democrat since Jimmy Carter.

Harris gave the protesters a moment—“I’m here because we believe in democracy,” she said—but when the outcry continued she grew impatient. She narrowed her eyes and said, “You know what? If you want Donald Trump to win, then say that! Otherwise, I’m speaking.” When the clip spread, Harris was broadly criticized from the left for the first time since her campaign began. (The writer Peter Beinart called her comment “stupid and heartless,” adding, “Why not acknowledge that what’s happening in Gaza is horrifying, and say you want to beat Donald Trump so you can stop it.”) Harris quickly made adjustments. Two days later, when protesters interrupted her in Arizona, she said calmly, “We’re here to fight for our democracy, which includes respecting the voices that I think we’re hearing from.” Then she went for a balance: “Now is the time to get a ceasefire deal and get the hostage deal done.” The uproar passed.

Harris had to decide if such demonstrators were vocal outliers or representatives of a voting bloc that could swing the election. She was relying especially on overwhelming support from young people, to counteract Trump’s lead with older Americans. Not long after the protest in Michigan, researchers at the University of Chicago released a national poll. Although forty-eight per cent of respondents under twenty-seven disapproved of Biden’s handling of the war in Gaza, only eleven per cent said that it made them less likely to vote for Harris. Over all, respondents were far more concerned about inflation, housing costs, abortion, immigration, and inequality.

On the Middle East, as in other areas of foreign policy, Harris hopes to be seen as a skeptical heir to Biden and Obama—ideologically similar but hardened by their mistakes. Phil Gordon, Harris’s national-security adviser, opposes attempts at regime change but has argued for the finite use of force; he faulted Obama for not bombing Syria after Bashar al-Assad crossed Obama’s “red line” by using chemical weapons. Compared with Biden, who has known Benjamin Netanyahu for nearly half a century, Harris has treated the Israeli Prime Minister coolly. (Asked on “60 Minutes” if he was a “close ally,” Harris suggested that the more important alliance was “between the American people and the Israeli people.”) And, unlike Biden, she does not typically see the great global challenge as democracy versus dictatorship; democracy is too wounded in Israel, Turkey, and other U.S. allies to sustain the distinction. Instead, with a lawyer’s eye, she tends to criticize violations of the law, such as China’s seizure of territory in the South China Sea. She also talks of forming closer ties among traditional allies in Africa, Southeast Asia, and Latin America, where China and Russia have increased their influence.

Harris came to Washington with scant foreign-policy experience. One expert who briefed her while she was in the Senate described her as a “complete blank page.” Since then, she has spent nearly four years seated alongside Biden in the Situation Room. She has met scores of foreign leaders and developed a diplomatic style that observers describe as focussed and direct—devoid of the small talk that Biden savors. A European official who met with her was surprised at how “inquisitive” she seemed. “She didn’t put herself forward as ‘I am the Vice-President of the most powerful country in the world.’ She showed herself in a very humble and very open way,” he said.

Harris the messenger sometimes makes a deeper impression than her message. In 2021, when she visited Guatemala and bluntly discouraged potential migrants by telling them, “Do not come,” American immigration-rights groups were furious. But Jorge Guajardo, a former Mexican diplomat, told me that the comment caused her no real damage. “It’s not any different from what we’ve been hearing from Americans throughout the decades,” he said. On the contrary, he went on, Harris has become popular among people in Latin America. “The political leaders of the region mostly would support a President Trump because they can deal with him—they know they will never be challenged by him on democracy, on corruption, on nepotism, on anything. But I think society would largely prefer President Kamala. She represents everything that the region aspires to.”

Naming a new Presidential candidate barely a hundred days before the election sent waves of disorientation throughout the Democratic Party. At the Convention, in Chicago, the official printed platform still contained numerous mentions of a “President Biden second term.” Lobbyists, milling around over drinks, complained that they didn’t know which of Harris’s aides to schmooze.

But the Convention also showed signs of Harris’s imprint on the Party’s culture. Emhoff, the Second Gentleman, delivered what amounted to a wedding toast about a midlife marriage. His son, Cole, said, “We might not look like other families in the White House, but we’re ready to represent all families in America.” Dana Nessel, Michigan’s attorney general, spoke about same-sex marriage, but, instead of offering another grave warning about conservative attacks, she said, “You can pry this wedding band from my cold, dead, gay hand. And I’m retaining a lot of water, so good luck with that.” Democrats were gambling that they could motivate more voters with patriotism than with fear. Delegates waved “U.S.A.” signs, and speakers talked about the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the American Revolution. At an after-party, Wyclef Jean, the Haitian American musician, played “The Star-Spangled Banner” and said, “You know what makes America great? We’re a bunch of immigrants.”

On the sidelines, where people pored over arcane PowerPoints of voter data, the mood was grimmer. One of the greatest worries was that Harris might ultimately fall short with workers in Midwestern factory towns, the kinds of places that Klain described as the fulcrum of the race—Flint, Manitowoc, Altoona. In a dreary hotel meeting room, a small group of Convention attendees got a briefing on the Democrats’ chances in the region. Celinda Lake, a prominent pollster, asked, “How do we bring these voters back?” She added, “If we don’t figure out that strategy, we’re not going to be winning these states anymore.”

There were some encouraging signs. Lake’s polls and focus groups in factory towns found that people could go left or right. They resent corporate greed and price gouging; they rely on Social Security and Medicare; they like Biden’s reduction in the price of prescription drugs and his efforts to revive manufacturing. Harris was hoping to reach working-class voters by focussing on the cost of living. She talked of expanding tax credits—including six thousand dollars for parents of newborns and twenty-five thousand for first-time home buyers—and of extending capped drug prices to people without Medicare. (The Harvard economist Jason Furman, who served in the Obama Administration, called her program “populism lite.”) But the residents of factory towns still see Democrats as “obsessed with L.G.B.T. transgender issues,” Lake said. “People believe that we are constantly bringing it up, that we care about it more than the economy.” I asked what those voters said about Harris. Mike Lux, a Democratic strategist, answered, “They knew who Joe Biden was, that he was a working-class kid, that he cared about them, even if they didn’t necessarily agree with him or blamed him for inflation. They don’t feel like they know Kamala Harris at all.”

A day after Harris’s rally in Michigan, she and Walz were due to speak at a union hall in Wayne, not far from Detroit. The United Auto Workers Local 900 sits across from a Ford plant and has a large sign in the parking lot that reads “NO FOREIGN VEHICLES ALLOWED ON THIS PROPERTY.” I’d arrived early (in a domestic car) and saw a hundred or so union members, many of whom work on Broncos or Rangers or electric batteries. The U.A.W. had endorsed Harris for President. David Green, who worked at a plant in Ohio before becoming a union leader, told me that Trump’s allure had faded when he failed to keep a promise to save imperilled G.M. plants. “Trump was telling people, ‘Don’t sell your houses. All these jobs, they’re all coming back.’ Two years later, the plant closed. People lost their fucking jobs. The hospital I was born in, Northside Hospital, closed. The barber shop I used to go to shut down.” He added, “I wrote him letters. I got nothing.” But Mark Gibson, a union leader at a diesel plant, still saw Trump’s effect on people. “We got guys coming to our plant in their twenties, and they have their opinions,” he said. “They’re getting on a bandwagon with something. They’re reciting those sound bites. ”

Before Biden ran for President, every Democratic ticket for three decades had included a graduate of Harvard or Yale. Harris and Walz extended the turn away from the Ivy League. When they arrived at Local 900, Shawn Fain, the president of the U.A.W., introduced them by saying, “They have working-class roots. They know struggle.” Walz, who often speaks with the amplitude of a man dismissing a pep rally in an orderly fashion, gave Fain a bro hug and greeted the audience as “sisters and brothers.” As a teacher, he belonged to a union for decades. His candidacy defied the Washington wisdom; many analysts had argued that Harris should choose Josh Shapiro, the governor of Pennsylvania, the swing state with the most electoral votes. But Walz provided, at least within the ambit of centrist Democratic policies, a way to avoid “false choices.” He is a military veteran and a hunter who wants more gun control, and a progressive who makes videos about the best way to clean a gutter or a carburetor—ordinary activities that become striking when you try to picture Bill Clinton doing them. Walz implored the autoworkers to spread the word about what Democrats have done for working people. “This is a bit of preaching to the choir,” he said, “but the choir needs to sing right now.”

Harris looked less comfortable; her working-class roots are mostly among the low-paid but high-status workers of academia. She started by saying, “Can we hear it again for Tim Walz? Isn’t he spectacular?” But, once she settled in, I heard her reach, for the first time in weeks, for a transcendent note in a speech. “There’s some perversion that’s happened in our country in the last several years, where there’s a suggestion that somehow strength is about making people feel small, making people feel alone,” she said. “But isn’t that the very opposite of what we know—unions know—to be strength? It’s about the collective. It’s about understanding that no one should ever be made to fight alone.”

She was trying to make the case that her politics of inclusion went beyond “L.G.B.T. transgender issues,” as Lake had put it. White factory workers in Wayne were part of the coalition, too. Toward the end of her speech, she said, “I understand the concept, the noble concept, behind collective bargaining. And here it is—fairness.” She went on, “Isn’t that what we’re talking about in this election? We’re saying, ‘We just want fairness.’ ”

Harris and Walz were arguing against cynicism, against Trump’s nihilism, against his poisonous projection that optimism is weakness, that cruelty is intelligent. Nearly a decade ago, when Trump entered politics, liberals took to circulating a passage by the late philosopher Richard Rorty. In 1998, Rorty reasoned that members of “labor unions, and unorganized and unskilled workers, will sooner or later realize that their government is not even trying to prevent wages from sinking or to prevent jobs from being exported.” He predicted that they would find “a strongman to vote for—someone willing to assure them that, once he is elected, the smug bureaucrats, tricky lawyers, overpaid bond salesmen, and postmodernist professors will no longer be calling the shots.” But it is only now that the Democrats are starting to heed the key prescription that came with Rorty’s diagnosis: the left must reclaim patriotism from the right. He wrote, “National pride is to countries what self-respect is to individuals, a necessary condition for self-improvement.”

Trump has had little use for national pride in the final months of the campaign. Fear has always been his primary instrument, and he has deployed it to summon ever more lurid fictions about immigrants. Recently, he told a crowd in Michigan, “They grab young girls and slice them up right in front of their parents.” In Wisconsin, he warned of outsiders who come to “rape, pillage, thieve, plunder, and kill.” Moreover, he threatened to imprison his opponents, including Democratic donors, lawmakers, and Harris herself.

When Trump won, in 2016, Obama wondered to aides, “What if we were wrong?” Ben Rhodes, Obama’s deputy national-security adviser, recently explained, “He was basically saying, ‘What if we were wrong about the inexorable progress toward multiracial democracy?’ ” But if Harris wins, Rhodes said, “it may end up that Trump, not Obama, is the weird parenthesis in history.”

On the other hand, if Trump returns to the White House—and especially if he does so after losing the popular vote again—the voters who thrilled to Harris’s sudden ascent will be profoundly demoralized. Already, according to the University of Chicago poll, fifty-eight per cent of young people say that American democracy isn’t working. Rhodes told me, “I think the Democratic Party would have an internal reckoning of a kind that we haven’t had in my memory.”

If that pressure weighs on Harris, she has seemed determined to make use of it, allowing herself to convey more gravity than joy. On the first Friday in October, she was back in Michigan, speaking to a gathering at a firehouse. “We have thirty-two days,” she reminded the crowd. “And we are the underdog.”

By late afternoon, she was in Flint, in a minor-league hockey arena. Backstage, in a makeshift photo studio with an American flag and a blue curtain, she stood in stilettos on a stained concrete floor. Locals lined up for pictures with her. Every politician has a characteristic style for such moments. Biden tends to chat so long that event organizers have to rerun the soundtrack. Harris is welcoming but efficient: a smile, a word, a subtle straightening of the spine that cues the photographer to wrap it up by saying, “Look right this way!”

One after another, people came with their rehearsed lines, searching her face for a connection. A woman from Pakistan, gesturing to her earrings, said, “For you, I wore my jhumkas,” and Harris leaned in to demonstrate appreciation. Another woman, in a white hijab, spoke rapidly and quietly about the Middle East, while Harris nodded. Then, perhaps a beat earlier than the guests would have liked, the photographer called, “Look right this way!”

There is no hyperbole in the observation that any handful of those voters, or the millions like them, has the power to tip the country’s fortunes. The Midwest is so evenly divided that in 2020 Biden and Harris won Wisconsin by an average of just three votes in each of the state’s roughly seven thousand wards—a difference small enough to hinge on a flat tire or a flu on Election Day.

I thought back to Gordon-Reed’s mention of politics as contingency. Just as a confluence of circumstances had lifted Harris to the doorstep of history, any mishap seemed capable of turning her away. Hurricanes ravaged the Gulf Coast and Appalachia; Israel and Iran careered toward war. Trump used each event to insist that the country was falling into chaos. But other facts were on Harris’s side: a deal that ended a dockworkers’ strike, a jobs report that proved the strength of the economy. Her campaign strategy barely budged. It rested on the proposition that Harris—still unfamiliar to many voters—was more appealing than the man who has occupied so much of the national psyche for the past eight years.

After the photos, it was time for Harris’s speech. She walked through a cinder-block hallway and took her position just offstage, shadowed by Secret Service agents and a man in a headset. For a moment, she stood behind heavy curtains that separated her from the crowd. By her shoulder, a monitor depicted the people on the other side—a roomful of weary, wary voters hoping that they had found a candidate who would carry the country forward.