Kamala Harris performed a miracle

But there’s another way to look at it: The fact that this race is essentially a coin flip is a miracle. Had Joe Biden not stepped aside and endorsed Harris in late July, he would have lost re-election. I don’t even feel compelled to explain why, since Biden’s sure defeat of Trump may be the one thing everyone in Washington agrees on. Instead, Democrats now have an even chance to stop him—and by extension, halt the rise of American authoritarianism. In the excruciating hours ahead, that should be a source of comfort, if not relief.

You can quibble with the campaign Harris has chosen to run — and I quibbled a lot — but she has done something extraordinary over the last 100 days, taking a race that Democrats were going to lose and making it possible to win. In the early spring, when it became clear that voters considered Biden incapable of serving a second term, Harris—an unpopular vice president whose only national campaign in 2020 had been a short-lived disaster—was viewed with enormous disdain at best. suspicion. Before Biden’s meltdown in his only debate against Trump this cycle, many worried that Harris would fare even worse than Biden if she became the nominee.

After that meltdown, however, it was obvious that Harris was the only plausible replacement for Biden — and that, given the risk (and indeed the likelihood) of a Trump landslide, any Democrat was preferable to the incumbent. There was no time for a conventional primary election. Any effort by the Democratic National Committee to stage an expedited one would have created division and controversy when the party simply could not afford it. Harris, flawed though she might be, had to be the choice. While she has by no means run a perfect campaign, she has exceeded expectations and put to rest most of those who doubted her ability to unify the party.