If the polls are to be trusted, the 2024 presidential election will be decided by razor-thin margins: somewhere in the agonizing space between Hillary Clinton’s 2016 defeat and Joe Biden’s 2020 victory. Since August, pollsters have consistently shown a dead heat in the seven swing states that will almost certainly decide the election. Pennsylvania, the most likely tipping-point state, has been the tightest of them all, with most poll aggregators giving either candidate a lead of less than half of a percentage point.
Given the possibly existential ramifications of a Donald Trump victory—a purge of the civil service, the deportation of millions, the weaponization of government against his imagined enemies—the tightness of the 2024 race is causing blood pressures to spike among Kamala Harris’s supporters. It’s also the source of bafflement, considering Trump’s increasingly batshit behavior on the campaign trail: How could an election between a sane vice president and an insane fascist be this close?
But there’s another way of looking 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 reelection. I don’t even feel compelled to explain why, as Biden’s certain defeat to Trump may be the one thing that everyone in Washington agrees on. Instead, Democrats now have an even shot at stopping him—and, by extension, halting the rise of American authoritarianism. In the excruciating hours ahead, that should be a source of comfort, if not relief.
One can quibble with the campaign Harris has chosen to run—and I have quibbled plenty—but she has done something extraordinary over the past 100 days, taking a race that Democrats were going to lose and making it winnable. In the early spring, when it was becoming 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 immense suspicion at best. Before Biden’s meltdown in his only debate against Trump this cycle, many worried that Harris would do 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 likelihood) of a Trump landslide, any Democrat was preferable to the sitting president. There was not time for a conventional primary. Any effort by the Democratic National Committee to stage an accelerated one would have created division and controversy when the party simply couldn’t afford it. Harris, flawed though she may be, had to be the pick. While she has not run a perfect campaign by any means, she has exceeded expectations and quieted most of those who doubted her ability to unite the party.
Harris entered the race as the unpopular vice president of a deeply unpopular incumbent president. Today, more voters view her favorably than do not—an astounding accomplishment in contemporary politics. Perhaps most impressively, she now polls roughly evenly with Trump on the question of who voters think is best equipped to manage the economy, which was perhaps Biden’s biggest weakness after his age. She has run a competent and at times exceptional campaign, handily winning her only debate with Trump and pushing a disciplined message: She cares about ordinary people, Trump is unfit to serve another term, and it’s time to move on from the Trump era (and, more subtly, the Biden one too).
Harris is not a generational politician. As I have written, she is not even a particularly different candidate from the one who crashed and burned in the 2020 primary. She is overcautious and too fond of bromides; her political instincts can be wobbly; it’s still not entirely clear what principles guide her foreign or domestic policy. But she has run about as impressive a campaign as you could expect any Democrat to run given the extraordinary situation that she found herself in—or that, more accurately, Biden put her, his party, and the country in by refusing to drop out of the race earlier.
If Harris loses, pundits will focus on a number of decisions: her choice of running mate, her reluctance to break with Biden, her muddled message to young and Arab American voters disgusted by her administration’s support for Israel’s destructive war in the Middle East, her overcautious approach to both messaging and policy. But the fact remains that Harris gave Democrats a chance they did not have before. That is an accomplishment in and of itself, no matter the outcome of the election.
