Jim Geraghty of National Review Online issues a warning about Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris.

It is almost required in conservative circles to insist that Kamala Harris is stupid. And Lord knows, speaking off the cuff, she serves up some stinkers. Since she was handed the Democratic Party’s nomination without any competition, even her prepared remarks have been mostly anodyne fluff. She still regularly demonstrates the political instincts of a lawmaker shaped by the far-left environs of San Francisco, oblivious to what constitutes the political center in swing-state America. In just the past week, she skipped the Al Smith Dinner, told a heckler shouting “Jesus is Lord” that he’s at the wrong rally, and responded to another heckler who accused her of “billions of dollars invested in genocide” in Israel that “what he’s talking about, it’s real, and so that’s not the subject I came to discuss today, but it’s real, and I respect his voice.”

But there’s this nagging complication — if Kamala Harris is as stupid as her critics claim, why does she have the Democratic presidential nomination and a roughly 50–50 shot of being the first female president in U.S. history? Do you know how many ruthlessly ambitious Democratic men and women have desperately yearned to get where she is? How many smart, tough, shrewd, often underhanded and cold-blooded pols have tried to claw their way up the greasy pole and fallen short?

And somehow this supposed dunce managed to do it?

The record indicates that whatever Harris’s results are on an I.Q. test or other measure of intellect, she is particularly talented by another measuring stick, one that may be even more important in politics: She is exceptionally skilled at getting other people emotionally invested in her success.

There’s some evidence that Harris has been drastically underestimated from her earliest years.