It’s barely been 48 hours since Joe Biden dropped out of the race for the White House, but one thing is clear: Kamala Harris can win.

The Democratic Party, from voters to leaders to delegates to donors, have lined-up behind Vice President Harris. There’s no guarantee yet that she will actually be the candidate. But in 24 hours she raised $81 million and secured enough delegates to win the party’s nomination—not a bad day’s work.

There is, of course, some worried hand-wringing. Most of the worries boil down to “the last time we ran a woman, she lost.” This is true—but it also treats one woman as a stand-in for all women, and derives a sweeping lesson from a single race.

It seems worth mentioning that a white man has lost in every single other election in American history, including two times to a Black man. Trump lost the popular vote to Clinton in 2016, and again to Joe Biden in 2020. We have not extrapolated out from that long history of losses that white men can’t win. We shouldn’t do the same based on the one election in which a woman was a major party’s nominee.

Harris also offers several unique strengths, particularly vis a vis Donald Trump. There is first—and most obviously—the fact that Trump has spent years attacking Biden for his age and cognitive abilities, suggesting that an old man shouldn’t be running the country. That was always a risky move for a candidate who is only three years Biden’s junior, and who will himself be in his 80s, and the oldest president ever, if he wins and serves a full term. But now it looks like an especially boneheaded strategy.

The GOP was remarkably successful at making Biden’s age an issue, and after the disastrous Trump/Biden debate earlier this summer, the entire country has spent the last month talking about how old is too old to sit in the Oval Office, and expressing concerns about the prospect of a very old man leading the nation. Well, Trump is now that very old man. He is a man who is not particularly articulate, and who often fumbles his words and mixes up people, places, and things. Voters have been primed—by him—to be very concerned about age and cognitive function. It was only in contrast to the subdued Biden that he seemed vigorous. Now he is almost surely facing off against a candidate who is two decades........

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