Okay, now what?

Barely more than one month ago, Kamala Harris was still just an incumbent vice president—not especially well-known or well-liked—who was out on the road raising money for President Joe Biden’s embattled reelection campaign. Everything changed on July 21. Now Harris is a star, riding a rocket sled of momentum. Her Thursday night speech accepting the 2024 Democratic Party nomination for president capped the best campaign month for an American politician probably ever. So how does she keep it going for 74 more days?

The laws of political gravity say sustaining this trajectory is pretty much impossible—that a downturn at some point before Election Day is inevitable. The next phase of the race is likely to include an increasing onslaught of attacks by Donald Trump. The leaders of Harris’s campaign all know this, which is why they’ve assembled a plan to try to extend their candidate’s run of good fortune and prepare for the most likely setbacks.

The first part of the strategy includes altering the mix of Harris’s public appearances. She will dial down the number of large rallies—which have been highly successful in generating excitement and attention and getting under Trump’s thin skin—in favor of speaking with smaller groups of voters, events similar in format to the bus-tour stops Harris and Tim Walz made in western Pennsylvania earlier this week. Harris will also soon sit for media interviews, something news outlets have been hounding her about for weeks. And she’s likely to roll out one or two more major policy proposals. “Trump is focused on his gripes and revenge and retribution,” says Cedric Richmond, a Harris campaign adviser and former Louisiana congressman. “She’s going to continue to do what she’s been doing, which is take her message directly to the voters and talk directly about the things they care about most: the cost of goods.”

The overarching goal during the next month is to define Harris’s image and ideas before Trump does, and to define her in contrast to Trump: for instance, as a prosecutor who took on shady for-profit colleges versus someone who ran one. The operating principle, though, is more immediate. “Will Smith once said that if you have enough good fucking days, you’ll have a good fucking life,” says Bakari Sellers, a Democratic strategist and former South Carolina legislator who is close to Harris’s campaign. “This campaign is about stringing together as many good fucking days as we possibly can. What Kamala Harris is trying to do is win the day.”

One enormous day looms: The Harris campaign sees her September 10 debate with Trump as the single most important thing happening in the next month, which is why she began prep sessions the week before the Democratic convention. In June, Biden’s debate with the former president drew some 51 million viewers; this one is likely to attract an even bigger audience. Trump has so far been incapable of consistently hitting the two main vulnerabilities Harris inherited from Biden: the economy and immigration. But her team knows those issues remain her greatness weaknesses, and that Harris will also need to explain why she took multiple left-of-center positions in her brief 2020 presidential run.

One thing that’s been striking about the shift from Biden to Harris is how little the fundamental playbook has changed. Back in March, at the campaign’s headquarters in Wilmington, Biden’s top lieutenants described to me essentially the same approach for this fall that’s unfolding now, including a push to illustrate the economic good news from the president’s first term. What’s changed, drastically, is the messenger. Instead of reciting statistics about moderating rates of inflation, Harris has smartly emphasized empathy around the fact that prices are still too high, and she’s done it with an energy and a coherence that Biden could no longer muster. “We had the structure in place, and now we’ve got a charismatic candidate plugged into it,” a senior swing state operative for the Harris campaign says. “There’s a lot of genuine excitement at the possibility of a woman becoming president, and of a Black woman becoming president.”

Harris’s performance has sparked relief and elation among Democrats. It has also provoked the political media to demand that Harris supply more policy detail. Some particulars will be spelled out in the coming weeks—though they likely won’t deviate greatly from Biden’s plans, and they won’t dominate the campaign’s time and attention. “Because you know what? All those excited young voters out there are really waiting to see her 15-point plan on banking regulation on TikTok,” jokes Cornell Belcher, a strategist for both of Barack Obama’s winning presidential bids. “Sure, the campaign is going to talk about policy, because they’re running a real campaign, and that’s what real campaigns do. But that’s for the chattering class. It’s not why she’s done something I thought was impossible, going from having a net negative favorability to a net positive in about two weeks. That was all social media. It was all grassroots. It was all energy.”

The campaign, even when it was Biden’s, had long planned for an unprecedented amount of digital-media spending this fall, which is likely to exceed spending on traditional TV ads. What’s changed, besides the lead character, is just how much money can be poured into the effort, mainly designed by deputy campaign manager Rob Flaherty, thanks to the flood of donations set off by Harris’s ascension. Last week Flaherty and principal deputy campaign manager Quentin Fulks announced a post–Labor Day ad buy of at least $370 million, with more than $200 million devoted to digital. To combat Trump’s attempts to “other” Harris, those ads will highlight her bike-riding, regular-American-kid upbringing and her years as a prosecutor. Another prominent theme will be shackling Trump to the right-wing Project 2025 agenda, and casting it as more akin to Project 1825 in enabling the government to do things like track women’s abortions. Many of those ads will be targeted at younger and non-white voters; Harris has better poll numbers than Biden with both groups, but actually turning them out on November 5 is a much harder task.

All the fresh cash will enable another crucial element of the plan to extend Harris’s momentum: stretching the playing field. She will continue to wear out airport runways in the core battleground states of Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Arizona, Nevada, and Georgia. She and Walz will also head to Nebraska, his birth state and a place that allocates most electoral votes by congressional district. But North Carolina should expect to see more of Harris, as could a few states that appeared to be lost causes when Biden was at the top of the ticket just over a month ago. “They should focus on those six or seven, but she also has to spend time in Florida,” Richmond says. “And Ohio, if you look at what they did to come out and protect women’s freedoms—I think that is all fertile ground to go and make arguments for why she moves the country forward.”

Some of Harris’s attention to additional states will be a head fake—she is still down 10 points in Ohio, for instance. But spreading the battlefield is already having an impact, forcing Trump’s allies to play defense in North Carolina, where Elon Musk’s super PAC is now hiring canvassers. The electoral map will grow even larger if David Plouffe has his way. Harris retained Jen O’Malley Dillon as the campaign’s top operative, but she brought in Plouffe, who ran Obama’s 2008 campaign, as an adviser. “If the ‘blue wall’ polling keeps moving in the right direction, it becomes about, What’s next?—especially with Plouffe in there,” says Belcher, who knows him well from Obamaworld. “Plouffe is all about expanding the playing field, about, Let’s go fuck with the Republicans and make them defend that state.”

The public mood has swung so fast and so far that Chauncey McLean, head of main pro-Harris super PAC Future Forward USA, warned against complacency while in Chicago this week. Yet no one inside the campaign expects the race to be anything but close all the way to the end. The outside world is sure to deliver surprises—maybe in Gaza, maybe on Wall Street, maybe from hackers. Not to mention, internally, Biden’s holdovers could clash with Harris’s hires. But she and the Democrats are leaving the convention on the offensive instead of just clinging to their life preservers—a posture that seemed unthinkable a very short time ago.