Over the past three years, as Democrats sank into a crater of quiet despondence over the inevitability of Joe Biden as their plainly diminished 2024 nominee, their anguish was made all the more acute by the fact that the party’s bench was replete with talent: accomplished, attractive, younger leaders with White House aspirations, any of whom would have been more capable of jousting with Donald Trump than the incumbent president. The list was long (Gretchen Whitmer, Josh Shapiro, Andy Beshear, Wes Moore, Gavin Newsom, Roy Cooper, etcetera) and much-discussed among party stalwarts in the first half of the year. Then came Biden’s debate disaster, and the list, with Kamala Harris’s name appended, became a topic of feverish public discussion, first as a catalog of potential Biden replacements and then—with two notable additions—of plausible Harris running mates.