OpinionLydia Polgreen

Credit...Photo illustration by Lauren Peters-Collaer

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By Lydia Polgreen

Opinion Columnist

I remember the moment I knew that Kamala Harris was not the candidate for me in the 2020 presidential race. It was just a few days before the second Democratic primary debate, and college student debt had become an issue on the campaign trail. Senators Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren were promising large-scale, no-strings-attached relief to borrowers.

On July 26, 2019, Harris announced her student loan forgiveness program. I rolled my eyes when I saw the details. It was the kind of overworked, technocratic, means-tested policy I associated with milquetoast Democratic triangulators: $20,000 in relief if you were poor enough in college to be eligible for a Pell Grant and then went on to start a business in an economically disadvantaged community and kept it afloat for at least three years. Hardly anyone would qualify. These kinds of small-ball policies were never going to defeat the faux-populist juggernaut of Donald Trump.

My skepticism about Harris surprised me at the time, because her background is a lot like mine: an ambitious biracial, bicultural Black woman of a certain age in a highly competitive line of work that historically hasn’t been welcoming to people who look like us. I admired her accomplishments. I had no doubt I would enjoy having a cocktail with her. But as a candidate, she just didn’t impress me, and if I had strong feelings about Joe Biden choosing her as his running mate, I have long since forgotten them.

And so it has taken me quite by surprise to find that I have become coconut-pilled. That’s the new nomenclature for converts to the Harris 2024 fold — a phrase that comes from her mother, and that I’ll dig into later. But I want to be candid about something first: I’m a little embarrassed to be rooting for any politician.

I have always voted, but like most journalists, I have tried to keep my political views mostly to myself. I’m not a joiner of causes. I’m a reporter, for most of my career a foreign correspondent, and my orientation toward those in power (as much from personal inclination as professional habit) has always been skeptical if not outright antagonistic. And yet on the morning after the disastrous June debate between Biden and Trump, I wrote with enthusiasm that I believed Harris should take over at the top of the ticket and very much could beat Trump.

Why did I come around to Harris, and why so quickly? A lot of people are now asking themselves how they feel about Harris and whether she can do the job — all understandable questions after five years when many people were meh, at best, on her. The flash flood of endorsements, donations and support for Harris has been astonishing. Be it because of relief that Biden bowed out or fear of Trump’s momentum after the assassination attempt and the Republican convention, there has been a consolidation around Harris that few expected.

I think you can trace the beginning of the vibe shift to Biden’s terrible debate and Harris’s interview with CNN’s Anderson Cooper shortly afterward, when she crisply defended Biden and made an energetic case against Trump. No one interview or moment would win me over, but it did make a strong impression: that Harris had been significantly underrated, that the chatter about her flaws for the past four years maybe didn’t tell her full story and that she had some unique talents and traits that made her a stronger candidate than her record might suggest.

Many political journalists were much more dubious about Harris’s chances against Trump. Cable pundits were spinning elaborate fantasies of mini-primaries and bake-offs with celebrity judges to decide the Democratic nomination. I wondered if I had been too credulous after the debate to see the potential in Harris. But it didn’t take long for my view to become the consensus among a lot of Americans.

With many of us evolving on Harris, I have wondered how Harris herself has evolved since she flopped in the 2020 Democratic primary contest. Has anything changed about her that has made Americans more open or enthusiastic about her, after years of bad headlines and disappointing public performances?

Americans have been through a lot since early 2020 — a pandemic, Jan. 6, a turbulent economy and high inflation, the invasion of Ukraine, the slaughter in Israel and Gaza and the never-ending 2024 presidential race. I also wondered if the Trump-Biden era changed what we want from a president. We are a frustrated, exhausted and divided nation. Most Americans believe we are on the wrong track, and we spent the past 20 months staring at a grim choice between........

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