“I launched my campaign for the President of the United States a mere two weeks ago,” Vice President Kamala Harris noted at the start of her campaign rally speech in Philadelphia Tuesday night. “It’s been a bit of a whirlwind.”

Take a minute to think where we were just a few weeks ago. Joe Biden had been trounced by Donald Trump in their debate in late June, seeming unfocused, hesitant, and sometimes unable to complete sentences. A little more than a week later, the New York Times/Siena poll showed Trump with a six-point lead over Biden. A poll by the Wall Street Journal at the same time produced the same result. Biden had fared poorly in polls by both newspapers earlier in the campaign cycle. This time, the Journal poll found that 80 percent of its respondents thought Biden was too old for a second term as president.

What transpired next was three weeks of hell for Democrats. Biden loyalists insisted that he could beat Trump in November. If we heard “it’s only one debate” once, we heard it a hundred times over those three weeks. But what little gas there had been in the Biden campaign tank was nearing empty with each lackluster clean-up interview. Trump, ascendant, was ebullient. He could taste the first Diet Coke he would tell an orderly to get for him as he settled once again into his chair behind the Resolute Desk in the Oval Office, a gift from Queen Victoria to President Rutherford B. Hayes in 1880. On the eve of the inauguration Trump would begin signing multiple executive orders his campaign bragged had already been written, overturning every significant act Biden took while in office and adding on more that would reflect. “Dictator on day one” Trump proclaimed his intention.

Despair settled over the Democratic Party and Biden campaign as Trump — miraculously buoyed by surviving an........

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