For Kamala Harris, things are going just about as well as they could be.
Late on Tuesday, Robby Mook, who managed Hillary Clinton's ill-fated 2016 campaign, remarked that it had been "a perfect 48 hours" for the US Vice President.
In that period, she secured the backing of practically every important Democrat, cleared the field of any serious challengers, smashed political fundraising records, and managed to refine a campaign message that felt markedly different from the one Joe Biden had been delivering only days before.
By any definition, the following 48 hours, and the 48 hours after that, were just as perfect.
Ms Harris emerged from a meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to deliver a forceful statement on the Gaza conflict centred on the suffering of Palestinians - referencing "images of dead children and desperate, hungry people fleeing for safety".
She earned the endorsement of the only remaining major holdouts, Barack and Michelle Obama, releasing a video of the call that dominated the day's news agenda.
And several opinion polls suggest Ms Harris has significantly narrowed the gap with Donald Trump.
The question, of course, is whether - with around 100 days to go - she can sustain the momentum.
Just one week ago, the Republican Party concluded their national convention with remarkable unanimity.
Party elites, once dismissive of their own candidate, fully embraced the so-called MAGA agenda - led by a man who had dramatically survived an assassination attempt only days prior.
Such was the power of the imagery that emerged - Mr Trump's bloodied ear, his fist pumped into the air - that, three months out, many had talked of the photograph that had won him the election.
Across the aisle, the Democrats were bitterly divided.
At the top of their ticket was Mr Biden, a visibly hobbled incumbent struggling to articulate a message to voters.
Despairing about Mr Biden’s candidacy following his disastrous debate performance, some senior members of the party had seemingly resigned themselves to a Mr Trump victory in November.
Already, the talk was of it being too late to change their candidate - that an internal contest to determine a successor would further disunite the party too close to an election.
Somehow, the Democrats have stumbled into a remarkably favourable position.
Had Mr Biden ceded the stage even three weeks ago, the Republicans would not have wasted their convention attacking him.
Mr Trump may not have selected JD Vance as his vice-presidential pick.
And Mr Trump's campaign would have had more time to pivot from a campaign strategy fixated on attacking Mr Biden's age and perceived weakness.
But to say they stumbled is to downplay Ms Harris's backroom strategy.
According to several accounts, as soon as President Biden announced that he was abandoning his re-election bid, she undertook a marathon of phone calls.
In just 10 hours, she reportedly made 100 phone calls to key members of her party.
"I wasn’t going to let this day go by without you hearing from me," Ms Harris told them, according to the New York Times.
That they now have a candidate who can conducted a marathon ten-hour session on the phone is not lost on them.
As he contended with the most perilous moment of his presidency, with party elders like former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi allied against him, Mr Biden reportedly made just ten phone calls to shore up support over a matter of days.
In her first week on the campaign trail, Ms Harris has displayed vigour and enthusiasm that most octogenarians would find hard to muster.
And, all of a sudden, the party is united.
Democrats are, as Mr Obama told Ms Harris on the phone, prepared "to do everything we can to get you through this election and into the Oval Office".
Of course, it is not just up to the Democrats. Ms Harris may have narrowed the gap with Mr Trump, but it is still a virtual stalemate, and America is still divided.
Despite Mr Trump trying to brand her as a "radical left lunatic", Ms Harris is perceived by the most progressives in the party as not left enough.
In a post-Black Lives Matter world, where defunding the police is the buzzword, her tough-on-crime past is an albatross that will be difficult to shake off, even if polling suggests that many Americans are concerned about violence.
Those same progressives turned away from Mr Biden - or 'Genocide Joe', as they have christened him - because of his stance on the conflict in Gaza. To them, he is too supportive of Israel, and insufficiently critical of its actions in Gaza.
Harris's Israel policy an open debate
Ms Harris's policy on Israel, however, is still an open debate: while these progressives are critical of her vocal support of Israel's right to self-defence, others believe she has been more willing to call Israel's actions in Gaza unacceptable, and to draw direct attention to the human cost of the ongoing conflict.
After meeting Mr Netanyahu on Thursday evening, she stressed that a ceasefire should be reached, that the suffering of Palestinians must end.
The Israeli-Palestinian conflict, she said, was too often seen as binary. Instead, she noted, both sides had an interest in resolving the conflict, insofar as a democratic and Jewish state of Israel could not sustain itself unless Palestinians achieve their right to self-determination.
Her remarks felt like a much clearer articulation of principles on the issue than we have ever seen from Mr Biden - and that may just be enough to move the needle.
But whether the actual substance is any different is debatable. That is because, on this matter, and many others, Ms Harris suffers from a palpable problem: after four years as Mr Biden's understudy, she has to somehow emerge from his shadow without obviously contradicting him.
He is still in the Oval Office, and she owes her pole position in part to his swift endorsement of her.
She has nevertheless broken from Mr Biden in ways that will not irk him. So far, she has dropped the warnings about Mr Trump's threat to democracy.
She is focusing much less on past accomplishments and much more on a hopeful message about the future.
"We believe in the promise of America," Ms Harris said in her first campaign ad. "We choose freedom."
Mr Trump, on the other hand, has a comparatively bleak vision of the future. Though, at the Republican National Convention, he promised to try and unify America, he quickly relapsed into old habits.
He described his country as a "nation in decline", its immigration crisis as "the greatest invasion in history", and likened undocumented migrants to Hannibal Lecter, the fictional serial killer from the film The Silence of the Lambs.
Ms Harris's message, buoyed by an outpouring of enthusiasm on social media from younger demographics, feels far more optimistic.
And then there is the fact that, even before she became the presumptive Democratic nominee, she was widely described as the party's most effective messenger on what could still become the defining issue of the campaign: abortion rights.
Though he ultimately supports a woman's right to choose, Mr Biden, a religiously observant Roman Catholic, has struggled to be a standard-bearer on the issue in the wake of the overturning of Roe v Wade, which had guaranteed that right for five decades.
The contrast between Ms Harris and her opponent couldn't be clearer.
"Today, our daughters know fewer rights than their grandmothers," she has noted of late. "This is a healthcare crisis, and we all know who to blame: Donald Trump."
Remarks made in 2021 by Mr Trump's running mate, JD Vance, in which he seems to refer to women who seek IVF treatment as "childless cat ladies" have gone viral for obvious reasons.
