So, Kamala.

Armchair pundits have spent the week following that unholy debate pondering various ways to get President Biden off the ticket — a brokered convention? An act of God? — only to remember that there’s a potential backup plan: Vice President Harris is already in line to be Biden’s successor, so if she could now win over enough voting delegates, it would solve Democrats’ unseemly election problem without having to somehow involve California Gov. Gavin Newsom.

“The Democratic nominee in 2024 should be Kamala Harris,” wrote former Ohio congressman Tim Ryan, who himself ran for president in 2020. South Carolina Rep. and kingmaker James E. Clyburn said he would support Harris if Biden dropped out. A Tuesday CNN poll showed Harris performing better against Donald Trump than Biden, as well as several other theoretical candidates including Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer and Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg.

Overnight, the #KHive rolled out of retirement, joined by a cohort of potentially ironic supporters who loved the vice president’s meme potential even if they haven’t fully considered her political potential. If your social media timeline was filled this week with obscure references to coconut trees, it was all an lol reference to a 2023 White House event, in which Harris publicly recalled the chiding words of her mother: “I don’t know what’s wrong with you young people. You think you just fell out of a coconut tree?” The vice president then elaborated on this bit of wisdom with an equally meme-able phrase: “You exist in the context of all in which you live and what came before you.”

Now come the posts:

Born to fall out of a coconut tree, forced to live in the context.

Look, this burgeoning, unstoppable freight train of a candidacy didn’t just fall out of a coconut tree. It exists in a context.

“Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this coconut tree!”

And so on.

Perhaps there’s something appealing, after Biden mumbled and stumbled through last week’s debate, about a Democratic candidate who can say something kinda loopy-sounding without everyone worrying that her mental faculties are expiring in real time. In the context of which we are all currently living, Kamala’s youthfulness has suddenly taken on the quality of a political superpower. The woman can dance. She’s pop-culture fluent. Plenty of people remember the way that, as a senator from California, she mopped the floor with Brett Kavanaugh at his Supreme Court confirmation hearings and would like to see how Trump fares in a debate against a 59-year-old former prosecutor.

For Democrats, a big problem with the former president has always been that while he might be vile, volatile and vain, he’s also funny. His jokes — or the weird things he says or posts, that other people turn into jokes — stick in the public consciousness. (“Despite the constant negative press covfefe”; “This is a tough hurricane, one of the wettest we’ve ever seen from the standpoint of water”; “Frederick Douglass is an example of somebody who’s done an amazing job and is being recognized more and more.”) Maybe the only way to combat his buffoonish-uncle vibe is with, as Choire Sicha put it in New York Magazine, a “three-drinks-in” auntie vibe. Dark Brandon is fading; behold, the rise of Momala Coconuts.

I’ll remind you that this is the opposite of how Harris was perceived as recently as last week. Throughout the Biden-Harris term, the conventional wisdom has been that she is the less popular of the pair, and that the mere threat of a Harris presidency would be enough to make independents abandon Biden entirely and vote for Trump instead. Why? Pick your insult: Kamala was a cop. Kamala was too oily. Kamala flamed out of the 2020 primary. Kamala reminded you of your ex-wife. There was something unpleasant about Kamala’s voice.

Some of this might have had a kernel of truth. People I’ve talked to who have interacted with her privately say she’s lovely in person but doesn’t always translate well on camera. I’ve only been in the same room with her once. After the overturning of Roe v. Wade, Harris convened a roundtable of reproductive-rights activists to discuss how to at least preserve access to medication abortions, which they feared would be the next target of conservatives (they were right). Journalists were allowed to observe only part of that meeting. But I do remember watching the authoritative and comfortable way that Harris addressed the issue of women’s health care, and contrasting it with a president who seemed as though he would sooner take an acid bath than even utter the word “abortion” out loud.

She wasn’t Joe, and that is why we are talking about her now, and this is why voters and pundits are excited about her now, and this is why voters and pundits rejected her in 2020. Because while there might have been kernels of truth in naming all of her flaws, evaluating Kamala in the specific is impossible to do without evaluating Kamala in context.

And the context of Kamala is that whatever people consciously think of her personally is impossible to separate from what people subconsciously think of her as a Black woman. Whether they’ll accept her. Whether they say that they’ll accept her but that other people won’t. Whether they’re lying to themselves on either count. Or, as the Black List founder Franklin Leonard posted on X, “The number of ‘I don’t have a problem with Black women. I’m just worried that people in the midwest have a problem with Black women’ conversations I’ve [been] forced into in the last week is going to have consequences, and I can’t necessarily predict what they are.”

So, Kamala.

People like her again, apparently. What changed? Heck if I know, except that maybe we have grown as a nation in the past week. Maybe what it took to recalibrate people’s minds was believing they had watched Biden become, by dint of decrepitude, less electable than the proverbial Unelectable Woman.

What I do know is that there is no room for sexism in foxholes. If you want to have a do-over at electing Kamala Harris, then you put aside your hand-wringing, nitpicking, delegate-mapping, crystal balling, is-she-presidential-ing, and you go all in for Kamala.

And this goes for whatever comes next: whichever candidate, whichever scenario. If you’re worried about who will sit in the White House, stop gaming out who a hypothetical Midwesterner will vote for, because plenty of us actual Midwesterners will vote for all kinds of people. If you’re worried about the bad vibes, stop creating them. If you’re worried about electability, remember that what makes a candidate electable is when you elect them into office.