Can Kamala Harris bluff her way to the White House?

‘There are no disasters,’ said Boris Johnson, who was born in America. ‘Only opportunities. And, indeed, opportunities for fresh disasters.’

That quote speaks nicely to the story of the Democratic party’s 2024 election campaign. The first televised presidential debate, in Atlanta, Georgia on 27 June, seemed to have been an absolute disaster. President Joe Biden’s clear and present feebleness had been exposed for all the world to see. His opponent, Donald Trump, became the favourite to win back the White House – then, 16 days later, Trump survived an assassination attempt, and his stock rose even higher.

Biden was going to lose, but most Democrats were reluctant to remove him because his obvious replacement, Kamala Harris, was the least popular Vice President in history.

Fast forward to today, however. Biden is out, Vice President Kamala Harris is in, and she has overtaken Trump in the polls. From being a catastrophe, that terrible debate now seems to have been the cathartic moment that the Democrats needed to turn their fortunes around. ‘What it did is it put reality in our face,’ says Christopher Hale, a Democratic fundraiser.

Looking back, party insiders believe that the decision – probably taken by Biden’s closest advisers, Mike Donilon and Anita Dunn – to hold the debate in June, rather than September or October, was a stroke of accidental genius. It was early enough to give the Democrats time to push a broken Biden off the presidential ticket – and sufficiently late to mean his replacement could run a short campaign that avoided the full scrutiny of an election year.

Harris is a pop-up nominee in an age of diminished attention spans, which gives her candidacy a strange new power. The hapless Vice President has been reinvented as Kamala the political superstar – and all the activists at Democratic National Convention in Chicago this week seem wildly excited.