Vice President Kamala Harris is the cover subject for this week’s Time Magazine. “The Reintroduction of Kamala Harris” is the headline, and this does not include an interview. Harris still hasn’t given a sit-down interview on TV or print media since she became the nominee. I keep going back and forth on whether that’s a smart strategy – whenever she does give an interview, it will be huge news and everyone will examine every single word (in a way they simply refuse to do for Donald Trump). Harris has always gotten a raw deal with the political press and Beltway media, and those same people seem genuinely shocked that Harris not only landed on her feet, but she’s actually polling much better than Trump nowadays. That’s what this Time cover story is about too, how the political media underestimated Harris and they’re still trying to figure out WTF just happened over the past month. Some highlights from Time:

The vibe shift: Harris has pulled off the swiftest vibe shift in modern political history. A contest that revolved around the cognitive decline of a geriatric President has been transformed: Joe Biden is out, Harris is in, and a second Donald Trump presidency no longer seems inevitable. Democrats resigned to a “grim death march” toward certain defeat, as one national organizer put it, felt their gloom replaced by a jolt of hope. Harris smashed fundraising records, raking in $310 million in July. She packed stadiums and dominated TikTok, offering a fresh message focused on the future over the past. Volunteers signed up in droves. Trump’s widening leads across the battleground states evaporated. Over the span of a few weeks in late July and early August, Harris became a political phenomenon.

Kamala in 2020 versus 2024: Where has this Kamala Harris been all along? For years, Democratic officials questioned her political chops, pundits mocked her word salads, and her polling suggested limited appeal. Her performance in the 2020 presidential primary was wooden, and her turn as Biden’s No. 2 did little to inspire confidence. Even this summer, as party insiders chattered about possible replacements if Biden stepped aside, “it was explicit from some of the major donors that she can’t win,” says Amanda Litman, the co-founder of Run for Something, an organization that trains young Democrats to run for office. “They didn’t think people were ready to elect someone like her.”

An inherited campaign: She inherited a campaign infrastructure and policy record from her predecessor, but the energy is all hers. Picking Walz as a running mate over more conventional choices signals a belief that this race is as much about feelings as it is about fundamentals. Harris’ brand shift—the happy-warrior attitude, the viral memes, the eye roll at Republican “weirdos”—has already done what no Trump opponent has ever been able to do: snatch the spotlight away from him.

Harris believes this race is fundamentally about reproductive rights: She may seem like an overnight sensation, but Harris’ moment was years in the making. Quietly, her small team of top aides had been laying the groundwork for a future presidential run. After the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision, the Vice President added reproductive rights to her portfolio. Abortion was never a comfortable issue for Biden, a devout Catholic, but it was a natural fit for his No. 2. Harris believed that with Roe gone, Republicans would turn their sights to restricting both birth control and IVF. In the months after Dobbs, she traveled the U.S., talking about abortion rights as a matter of “reproductive freedom.” As far back as the 2022 midterms, aides say, she argued for making this the core of the party’s national message, even as the White House focused on jobs and the economy.

Harris & her advisors were planning her 2028 run: During those travels, Harris’ team assembled a spreadsheet of allies, power brokers, and potential delegates to tap if and when the time came. Every photo line, every VIP invitation, every clutch with labor leaders, every meeting with key constituencies was filed away. The goal, advisers say, was to ensure there would be allies on every delegate slate in every state in the nation. “We had a list,” says one top aide, “and we checked it twice.” The list was intended for 2028. But when Biden dropped out on July 21 and quickly endorsed Harris, it was instantly pressed into service.

What she did when Biden endorsed her: The Vice President—clad in a Howard University sweatshirt, munching pizza with anchovies—spent the next 10 hours on the phone, dialing delegates and wrangling endorsements. A day later, the nomination was all but hers. Even though other presidential hopefuls had ties to swing states or big donors, “the list was the thing that we had that they didn’t,” says a top aide. “It wasn’t a fairy godmother waving a magic wand.” Harris’ ability to sew up the nomination so quickly was a triumph of work ethic and political dexterity that foreshadowed what was to come. “To consolidate the Democratic Party in a matter of hours, to do as many visible events and establish that presence without putting a foot wrong, is a feat,” says Pete Buttigieg, the Transportation Secretary who ran against Harris for the 2020 nomination and was a finalist to become her running mate. “I don’t think anybody expected her to be so flawless.”

[From Time Magazine]

Something which goes missing in Time’s analysis is that Harris is a quick learner and she’s still being mentored by President Biden. I’m sure Harris and her team picked up the football and ran, all on their own initiative, and I’m not saying Harris’s success is due to Biden altogether. Harris has absolutely put in the work and we can tell. But Harris has also been at Joe Biden’s side for four years. He’s been preparing her and putting her in the rooms where she can learn on the job. That’s what people are missing about “what happened in the past four years, why is she suddenly so good at this” talk. They’re missing Biden’s influence and his belief in her abilities.

It’s so, so smart for Harris to completely engage with choice and reproductive rights too. She was right to argue for that in Biden’s reelection campaign and she’s right to center that conversation in the last three months of the election. After Dobbs, it became a fundamental political truth: women are f–king mad. We are so pissed off and we needed a candidate who can talk about it.

Photos courtesy of Avalon Red, Cover Images. Cover courtesy of Time.