Kamala Harris just showed us the promise of a post-MAGA future. Now it’s up to the voters to decide to take us there.

In her rousing convention speech on Thursday, Harris offered many olive branches to right-leaning independents and Republican voters. She vowed toughness on immigration and crime. She promised to transcend the nation’s divisions. She vowed to govern for all Americans and transcend faction or party. She made numerous appeals to voters with decidedly right-leaning values.

But, in mulling what Harris means by all this, it’s crucial to appreciate what she did not do. Harris offered all this outreach to voters outside the core Democratic coalition without making serious concessions to the ideological preoccupations we associate with MAGA-style right-wing populism. There was no real accommodation with what might be called The World According to MAGA.

Instead, Harris treated Trumpism and the MAGA movement as forces that must be decisively repudiated—and unequivocally left behind.

How could Harris appeal extensively to voters on the other side—which by definition includes tens of millions of people who voted for Donald Trump—while insisting on a firm national renunciation of many MAGA voters’ apparent aspirations and beliefs? This tension, I think, helps explain why her appeals came across as so richly complex.

Harris extensively reassured swing voters on many fronts. For those struggling economically, she offered populist, broadly appealing policies to curb health care and housing costs. To those preoccupied with crime and the border, Harris recounted her history as a tough prosecutor and vowed stringent border security. Harris delivered extensive paeans to middle-class struggles and values like family, community, homeownership, and faith. As William Kristol notes, she even strongly endorsed American exceptionalism.

Yet Harris was also absolutely unsparing in her takedown of Trump. And it’s important to appreciate this criticism for what it really was. In numerous ways, Harris portrayed the broad MAGA worldview as something in need of comprehensive repudiation.

A certain pundit theory of this election goes like this. The rise of Trump revealed an authentic upsurge of right populism in this country. In this telling, many voters do not see Trump’s violent insurrection as too dramatic a crime, because they’re skeptical of our institutions and don’t feel liberal........

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