As Republicans scramble to attack the youthful, energetic Vice President Kamala Harris, after spending months hammering President Biden’s age and infirmity, they’ve hit on a new argument: that Harris owns her boss’s record of failure from top to bottom, so running against her will involve only minimal repurposing of the ongoing GOP indictment of Joe Biden’s America.

“This is the essence of what Trump’s campaign believes—that any Democrat who picks up the party’s banner will inherit the baggage that made Biden unelectable,” reports The Atlantic’s Tim Alberta. The campaign wants this election to remain a referendum on the status quo under the unpopular incumbent, allowing Republicans to continue exploiting deep voter dissatisfaction with the country’s direction.

But Harris’s maiden speech as the presumptive Democratic nominee on Monday shows that she may be able to flip this script in a surprising way—thanks to the national debate over abortion.

It’s often said that Harris can “prosecute the case” against Trump on reproductive freedom. But there’s far more to it than this: As a skillful communicator on the issue, she can also argue that if voters elect a Democratic president and Congress, they will codify protections for abortion rights nationwide—and argue it far more compellingly than the devout Catholic Biden ever could.

If that were to be accomplished, it would actually constitute a dramatic redirection of the status quo that now reigns in post–Roe v. Wade America. Importantly, it would reverse the status quo wrought by Trump, who brags about appointing the Supreme Court justices that struck down Roe—a status quo that will be perpetuated into the indefinite future, and likely made much worse, if Trump is elected to a second term.

That’s why some of the most important moments in Harris’s speech—delivered at campaign headquarters in........

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