Evan Osnos, writing in The New Yorker, on what has been, win or lose, one of the more remarkable rises in American politics.

By gaining the nomination so late, Harris spared herself the obligation of courting the orthodox wing of her party in primaries. But a short run has risks; it left her little time to explain what she believes and what she would do in office. Temperamentally, she preferred to disgorge policy points than to explore her thinking with reporters. Early focus groups showed that voters had only vague impressions of her, and Republicans were racing to shape them, calling her a “D.E.I. hire” and “Comrade Kamala.”

In fact, Harris has never been a favorite of the left, and progressives in Congress, such as Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, had fought to keep Biden in the race, assuming that a Harris Administration would not give their priorities as much attention. For as long as Harris has been in politics, she has been motivated less by ideology than by a practical ambition to widen the perimeter of power, to make insiders out of outsiders—including, not incidentally, herself. Rather than try to upend the system, she has vied to run it.

As the campaign enters its final weeks, neither Harris nor Trump has a decisive advantage. She is ahead by roughly 2.5 per cent nationally, but it’s not clear that the margin is wide enough to win the Electoral College. (Democrats have secured the popular vote in seven of the past eight Presidential elections, but lost the electoral vote, and the White House, in two of them.) Harris is desperately trying to hold together an anti-Trump movement that sprawls from “Cheney to Chomsky,” as Maurice Mitchell, the national director of the Working Families Party, told me. “Her challenge is to make sure that none of the factions flee,” he said, “and, at the same time, to win over new people.”

The race has been steady for weeks on end. It will either be a nail biter or a blowout.