Welcome back to The Best & The Brightest. I’m Tara Palmeri, coming to you from the Republican National Convention on the final night, where Donald Trump will be accepting his party’s nomination for president for the third time. Meanwhile, Democrats are trying to push out their leader while Republicans are holding their breath, hoping he’ll hang on…

🎧 Programming note: I’ve been burning up the podcast feeds, dropping new content daily, so please subscribe to my show, Somebody’s Gotta Win. On Monday, The Atlantic’s Tim Alberta and I discussed what J.D. Vance means for the future of the conservative movement. On Tuesday, Trump’s political director, James Blair, mapped out their path to 270, explaining why they’re absolutely giddy (for now) about November, and my brilliant partner Julia Ioffe dropped in to unpack her explosive report on Joe Biden’s deranged call with House Democrats. And if you haven’t had a chance to read my partner Peter Hamby’s in-depth panel conversion on the impact of women voters over the age of 50, you can find the transcript here.

Now, here’s Abby Livingston with the emerging view of Kamala on Capitol Hill…

Much like Biden four years ago, Harris doesn’t seem to be anybody’s first choice. But, just like the president in 2020, she’s quickly solidified as a universally acceptable option. Nearly every Democrat has engaged in Biden-replacement game theory, and the notion of an abbreviated open primary has offered some thrilling political fantasies—Big Gretch’s Midwestern street cred; Newsom’s telegenic swagger; Josh Shapiro’s grace and purple state bona fides; fan favorite Raphael Warnock of Georgia—but it’s hard to find anyone who doesn’t think Harris will wind up as the nominee, one way or another. Here’s a snap view of the emerging consensus…

• She’s improved: It’s no secret that Biden administration operatives (including her own staffers) put out word to the D.C. press corps in her first year as V.P. that she was not ready for primetime. This 2021 chatter was everywhere, from lunch at Le Dip to happy hour at Off the Record. And the timing—as Washington was coming out of the pandemic, and the Gang of 500 was thirsty for fresh gossip—did devastating damage to her image and credibility.

  But my partner Peter Hamby was onto something earlier this month, espousing a view that operative after operative has reiterated to me in recent weeks: Harris’s time in the spotlight has sharpened her political skills, and the arrival of former Schumer/Hillaryworld denizen Brian Fallon as her communications director has improved her image. Moreover, as Biden and his team have become more erratic, Harris has been an oasis of calm and normalcy on the trail. There remains, understandably, concern about her campaign management skills. (Recall that Harris was one of the first candidates to drop out of the 2020 race.) But, alas, none of the other contenders have ever run for the Oval or been as thoroughly vetted.

• She solves a lot of problems: Should Biden withdraw, it no longer really matters what happens with Hunter Biden, or that the president stumbled over his words in the latest interview. Harris is not the face of the administration’s Israel-Gaza policy, either. Sure, her previous mandate covering border security, a thankless issue, would make her vulnerable to Trump attacks. But that might be offset by her youth and ability to make reproductive rights and Roe politics the central issue of a truncated election campaign.

  Harris also offers some pragmatic upsides amid a historically stunning political crisis. Within the party, many Democrats aren’t eager to cross the Congressional Black Caucus—whose members have been some of the highest-profile Biden defenders—twice in a single month. If the C.B.C. wants Harris, they will be taken extremely seriously. Moreover, an emotional exhaustion has set in, and my sense is Democrats simply want to get on with it and don’t have the bandwidth to wage a mini-primary.

• She could save the House: The down-ballot worldview has been that if Biden and Harris are polling around the same, she is the safer gamble with much more potential upside. She takes the pressure off Democratic incumbents to distance themselves from the president. And perhaps a reintroduction to the American public in a real convention—not a pandemic-era virtual convention—along with a real, three-cities-a-day road show campaign has the potential to reset her image.

Alas, it’s hard to not draw parallels to the Democrats’ current political crisis. As Donald Trump prepares to speak tonight at the R.N.C., the walls are closing in on Joe Biden. Right now, my well-placed sources believe it’s not a matter of if he withdraws, but when. (The Times, in its careful prose, suggested this afternoon that the president has “begun to accept the idea that may not be able to win in November.”) Sure, the assassination attempt on Trump, and then Biden’s Covid diagnosis, may have bought the West Wing a few extra days, but I’m told party leaders on the Hill won’t stop pushing.

Of course, Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer are being less and less subtle in their redoubled campaign to orchestrate his ouster while making plans for the future of the party. In fact, I’ve heard they’ve largely bypassed the Biden family and the president’s inner circle, who have collectively pissed off the power brokers on the Hill. “Nancy is historically always a first mover on legislation, and Schumer is always a closer,” said a senior Hill source with knowledge of the matter, who described this situation as fluid. “It’s a campaign. There’s a lot of reinforcement—there’s no one person who’s going to be the person who ‘did’ it. It’s going to be the collective pressure.” To wit: On Wednesday, Pelosi’s right hand, Rep. Adam Schiff, the former Intel chairman and the next senator from California, explicitly called on Biden to step down from the ticket. If private conversations are a predictor of future defections, there will be many more to come.

On the Zoom call, Pennsylvania Rep. Chrissy Houlahan confronted Biden about the fact that he’s down by four to five points in her purple state. The president said he didn’t believe her. “When Biden says ‘I haven’t seen it,’ he’s saying ‘I don’t give a fuck,’” said the senior Hill source. “They’re giving him a bunch of numbers that are ever-changing and fluid, so for Biden, Monday and Tuesday is a new day. He doesn’t believe what they’re showing him now is accurate.”

Another member on the call told me they started a text chain afterward to express their frustration. The initial purpose of the call, perhaps ironically, was to speak directly to Biden, since many Democratic members feared his inner circle was withholding data that showed him losing. “There was a belief that the president isn’t getting an accurate assessment of where the race stands right now,” the member said.

A source close to the inner circle expounded: “The president is talking to Mike and Steve in this moment like he has throughout his political life. Mike has been one of the president’s closest advisors for 40 years. Steve has been one of his closest political counselors since the vice presidency and his main Hill conduit.” Biden, meanwhile, has maintained that the dust will settle in the next few weeks and that his polling will improve. He’s focused on the popular vote, I’m told, which shows him within the margin of error against Trump. “Ask Hillary how that goes,” the senior Hill source quipped.

According to the Democratic member, that’s precisely the problem. “We’re in the worst of both worlds,” this person said. “In an odd way, it would be better for them if the polling were 10 points worse, because it would spur change. He’s losing, but it’s close enough that he can squint and see a path to victory.”

Inside the Biden campaign bunker, there’s a feeling like they’ve done what they can, and now everyone is simply holding their breath. “We’re doing all of these things that have already been reported,” a Biden campaign official told me. “Using the lower stairs, honoring the 8 p.m. curfew that was mandated after the debate. We’re going out of our way to acquiesce to the candidate’s challenges that we should have seen coming. I’ve seen declines, but it’s been more recent and precipitous.” This campaign veteran, an Obama alumnus, recalled that Obama traveled three to four days per week during his reelection campaign. Biden is traveling one to two days per week, with one or two stops per day, whereas Obama would hold two or three events in a day. “It’s not like Obama in ’08, where it’s like, ‘Fuck yeah, let’s do this thing!’” the official said.

Meanwhile, things at the testosterone-soaked R.N.C. are about to get even more gladiatorial, with a lineup tonight that includes Hulk Hogan, Kid Rock, and Dana White. The star attraction, of course, is Donald Trump himself, who’s spent the last several days seated above the crowd gazing down at the proceedings like the emperor. On the sidelines, Republican delegates and campaign officials privately tell me they’re practically praying that Biden stays on the ticket—or this may be their last party for a long time. After all, according to the OpenLabs polling memo recently leaked to my partner Peter Hamby, anyone on the Democratic bench other than Biden, including Kamala Harris, would pull five points ahead of Trump in the battleground states. The assassination attempt may have scrambled the numbers, but perhaps only on the margins.

One level below the convention floor, I spoke to Trump’s political director, James Blair, for my podcast, Somebody’s Gotta Win, where he told me the campaign is expanding their sights to Virginia, Minnesota, and even New Jersey. “We have more than two dozen paths to 270 right now, and if you look at the Real Clear Politics average, I mean, we’re polling at 300-plus electoral votes,” Blair said. “You heard that right,” he said when I blinked, doubling down.

When I asked if they were ready to take on a candidate other than Biden, Blair replied, “We’ll take any of ’em. We’ve put up a good campaign that prepares for all possible outcomes, so that it can pivot and adjust as needed. I think that all the evidence indicates right now that Joe Biden will be the candidate, but if that changes, we’ll certainly be prepared. And I think the bigger question is, what do they do if the candidate changes? What is the game theory on that? All of their campaign is predicated around Joe Biden being the candidate. What happens if it’s someone else?”

He continued: “The idea that they’re just going to magically solve all of their problems as Democrats build some great coalition in a matter of three months around someone untested on the national stage? That’s a big bet to make.”