Kamala rising

WHAT A DIFFERENCE a debate makes. This time last week, California Sen. Kamala Harris was consistently positioned in fourth or fifth place in the more consequential opinion polls, part of the fab five that’s become the consensus of voting respondents ... but always clinging to that last rung of the ladder.

Former Obama vice president Joe Biden was the top of the pops in the polling by commanding margins, all but lapping the field. It’s been Biden and everyone else, with the former veep floating above the others by double digits.

But in politics, as in the physical world, defiance of gravity is a transient experience. You can pull it off for a while, but sooner or later, the glide path to a sure thing falls apart. Turbulence is the one thing that’s reliable.

Kamala Harris was there to capitalize — via her own hard work and Biden’s lack of the same — when that happened on June 27 in Miami. The result: four successive post-debate polls that, in total, redraw the presumptive roadmap to the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination, and invite a fresh look at a campaign whose current growing self-confidence really wasn’t hard to see coming. If we were paying attention to her.

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We knew her win in Miami was dramatic; just how dramatic became clear with the CNN/SRS poll, released on July 1. In that first of the post-debate surveys, Harris rocketed to second place (with 17 percent), right behind Biden, whose 22 percent polling reflects a drop of 10 points. Harris leapfrogged over Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren (15 percent) and Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders (14 percent).

It wasn’t a one-off. In Morning Consult’s first post-debates poll, on July 2, Harris gained six points to tie with Warren for third place, behind Biden and Sanders, reflecting the biggest percentage-point gain of all the top candidates.

The same day we got results from the HuffPost/YouGov poll, asking Democratic voters who was capable of beating Trump: Harris climbed into third place (with 39 percent), one point behind Warren (40 percent) in second. Also, the USA Today/Suffolk university poll from the same day found Harris shouldering her way into second place, behind Biden, in a survey of Iowa voters.

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IN THE POST-debate Quinnipiac College poll of black voters, Harris gave Biden all he could handle, coming in in second place, with 27 percent support (Biden had 31 percent) — and, interestingly, topping Sen. Cory Booker, the only viable black male candidate in the race.

She never broke through to a first-place finish in any of these surveys, but that’s not the real benchmark for success in this scenario. Since vaulting from fifth to second in one day was never considered a possibility for Harris before the debate, the fact that it happened ran contrary to the worldview of seers and analysts — the same ones who more or less ignored her for weeks before the debate.

Someone occupying the bottom of the middle of the pack was never expected to come within statistical whispers of the frontrunner. Harris did it, and she did it in more than one poll on more than one day. In a word, Harris is gaining momentum, and though it’s tempting to cite cause-and-effect from the end of the debate, she’s been gathering steam from before her campaign even started.

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Harris has a growing reputation as someone unafraid to confront Trump’s proxies and nominees — witness how she dealt with Supreme Court Justice and malt beverage enthusiast Brett Kavanaugh during last year’s confirmation hearings.

And so far, she’s been largely able to navigate her own professional past as a prosecutor through the rough water of Democrats’ sometimes inflexible sense of populism.

Black American voters, often allergic to candidates with histories as the people responsible for putting black Americans in prison and jail, have been warming to Harris’ message and an organic, full-throated identity as one of their own. The Quinnipiac survey of black voters seems to bear that out.

In 1867, Otto von Bismarck observed that “politics is the art of the possible,” and you’re free to dismiss the Prussian’s wisdom; after all, he never ran in the Iowa caucuses. But Harris’ campaign has embraced that idea and now communicates that principle more engagingly than any other candidate now running. If momentum, money and message can move in something approaching lock step, there’s less and less reason why Harris can’t take advantage of a corollary to Bismarck, one that worked for Donald Trump: Politics is also the art of making the possible out of the seemingly impossible.

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Image credits: Polling results graphics, Harris at second candidates' debate: NBC News.