That groundswell of support, combined with her energetic public appearances after Mr. Biden’s endorsement, catapulted Ms. Harris to overnight-sensation status as she waltzed unopposed into the Democratic convention. The journey that she described in her acceptance speech as “unexpected” would over time take on an aura of inevitability.
Nonetheless it is a trajectory freighted with portent, of the sort that sometimes seems like the fruit of a Hollywood scriptwriter’s overly caffeinated imagination. A daughter of immigrants, reverential of law and order, determinedly stoic, finds herself pitted against a bombastic white male who has been accused and convicted of numerous criminal offenses and whose political vocabulary is a soundtrack of grievance and bigoted insults.
The two have in common a desire for the presidency and nothing else.
If Mr. Trump loses, he is likely to claim otherwise, as he has ever since he was defeated four years ago. Ms. Harris, for her part, publicly acknowledged that she had no path to victory during her previous quest for the presidency, when she suspended her campaign on Dec. 3, 2019, before the Iowa caucuses.
Five days earlier, she and her husband hosted a Thanksgiving dinner at their rental house in Des Moines, where Ms. Harris had been spending much of the previous weeks campaigning. In addition to the Harris family, two other invited guests showed up: Ms. Klobuchar, then Ms. Harris’s rival for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination, and her husband, John Bessler.
“She already knew what was upon her,” Ms. Klobuchar recalled.
But, she added, the subject of defeat did not come up. Instead, Ms. Harris made the dinner, served it, sat with her niece’s two small daughters in her lap, left the campaign at the end of the weekend and returned to her job in the Senate.
