So if you understand the challenge facing the Democratic Party as holding together their national, state, and local urban/suburban coalitions based on a straddle between comfortable gentry that scrabbled to the 85th percentile and want to stay there and poor a/o minorities who think after all their scrabbling they deserve at least say 45, elevating Kamala Harris as a prominent figure makes sense, in line with Biden’s vibe that’s really less about repeating Obama’s term than “back to the (pre-Obama) Clinton 90s”, the evolution of the “cabinet that looks like America”

(among other things, this choice frees a statewide slot in California the Dems can fill in thaf talent-overrich, term-limited state)

She’s being more explicitly elevated as a successor than most VPs though, it’s unclear that she has the same theory of party change, and the things that position her for a Prez run might have conflict with what Biden wants to get done.

It makes the Biden proposition from “vote for him an get an old white back-to-the-90s guy” to that, “and later, an increased chance of ???”. I think at the margins, the ??? of a prosecutor they’ll have a chance to judge at the ballot anyway won’t feel like a threat to the gentry, and a black woman is something that dem-aligned civil society, which the 90s Dems cultivated as intermediaries to identitarian voting blocs, can work with.