It’s particularly rare to have the same column praised by Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzeziński on MSNBC and Greg Gutfeld of Fox News, but somehow Monday’s Morning Jolt managed to do it.

I think the Morning Joe crew might have interpreted it more generously to Kamala Harris than it was written, but the point stands. As much as Harris might seem like a rambling idiot to the average conservative, she’s still got about a 50-50 chance of being the next president of the United States. She’s got every corner of the Democratic Party and its allies knocking themselves out, pulling out all the stops to elect her, with a huge cash advantage and able to outspend Donald Trump’s campaign “on television and digital ads, voter contact efforts, and staff members.” This doesn’t guarantee she’s going to win; Hillary Clinton outspent Trump, too. And no doubt, she has some gargantuan flaws as a candidate, particularly in interviews and answering questions like at last night’s town hall on CNN. But she knows how to dazzle the Democratic party’s donor class and most of their interest groups. (Blue-collar unions are a notable exception.)

In other words, she may not excite and inspire you, but she does excite and inspire other Democrats. And that might just be enough.

In fact, no matter how the electoral college shakes out, there’s a decent chance that next month, more Americans will cast a ballot for Kamala Harris than anyone else in U.S. history.

With the exception of 1988, 1996 and 2012, the total turnout in presidential election years has increased every cycle since 1944. We would expect this, since the U.S. population, including voting-age population and eligible voter population, increases every four years.

According to the Census Bureau, the U.S. population today, is a bit more than 337 million people; four years ago on this date, we were approaching 332 million.

Since 1996, turnout has jumped between 7 million votes and 22 million votes every cycle. That largest jump came last cycle, increasing from almost 137 million votes in 2016 to more than 158 million votes in 2020.

Let’s assume turnout in 2024 increases to 167 million. Harris is currently at 48.7 percent in the RealClearPolitics average.

The all-time record for votes for a candidate was Joe Biden last cycle with 81,283,501; the second highest was Trump the same year with 74,223,975. The third highest was Barack Obama in 2008, with 69.4 million votes.

Let’s round up Harris’ vote share up a smidge and say she gets 49 percent. If Harris gets 49 percent of 167 million votes, she’ll have 81.8 million votes and narrowly surpass Biden; even if turnout grows only marginally, to, say, 165 million votes, she would have about 80.8 million votes, the second-highest total of all time.

People can scoff that Harris is only in the spot that she is in because first, Biden backed himself into a corner by promising to pick a woman running mate. Then the George Floyd riots stirred up enormous, open pressure on Biden to pick an African-American woman,  coming from Democrats like James Clyburn, Harry Reid, and one of the early contenders, Amy Klobuchar.

But remember, the Bidens did not have warm and fuzzy feelings about Harris before the selection. During the 2019 stretch of the 2020 Democratic primary, Joe Biden fumed that Harris’ debate stage attack was “some f—ing bulls—.” Jill Biden reportedly wanted to tell Harris to “Go f— yourself.” Biden allies like Chris Dodd thought her debate attack had been a cheap gimmick.

That’s an enormous hurdle to overcome to being selected as Biden’s running mate. Biden had other, less well-known African American women options — former national security advisor Susan Rice, then-congresswoman Karen Bass, then-Atlanta Mayor Keisha Bottoms.

And yet, Harris was the pick – in considerable part because years earlier, Biden’s son Beau Biden, had praised her work as California’s state attorney general. As Biden said when announcing the Harris as his running mate, “there is no one’s opinion I valued more than Beau’s.” And of course, former President Barack Obama raved about Biden’s selection of her. Throughout her career, Harris has impressed the right people at the right time to reach up to that next rung on the ladder. Chalk it up to luck, chalk it up to charm; whatever it is, she repeatedly demonstrates that word-salad answers have not been a major impediment to her winning races.

Right now, I think Trump has a narrow advantage and the Democratic panic is real. But it’s still quite plausible that the blue wall holds, Harris wins that second congressional district in Nebraska, and Kamala Harris becomes the 47th president with 270 electoral votes.