On the Fourth of July, hundreds of prospective voters arrived early to a houseparty in Indianola, Iowa, to see Kamala Harris. They lined the dirt driveway, a stretch of the sprawling lawn, and a half mile of the surrounding street with parked cars. In the back yard, Harris supporters formed a sweaty semicircle around the deck. (The wisest brought their own folding chairs.) As the crowd swelled and the temperature rose to ninety degrees, partygoers used umbrellas as parasols and “Kamala Harris for the People” signs as heat shields. During introductory remarks by the Iowa state representative Scott Ourth, a member of the crowd passed out. “Everything’s fine and dandy,” Ourth reassured the audience, as Harris’s campaign staff carried the wilted guest indoors. “Bring her out! Bring her out!” the crowd chanted. “Kamala’s in there talking to the person that fainted,” Ourth retorted. “What I was saying was what drives her most is the love that she shares with other people, and how that love manifests itself through her service to the United States.” With that, Harris swept through the porch’s sliding glass doors, eliciting an outburst of applause that muffled her signature walkout song, “Work That,” by Mary J. Blige. “Our friend is gonna be fine,” Harris told the crowd, referring to the ailing guest. “And there are a lot of friends around her, so we’re gonna send her best wishes.”

During her three-day swing through Iowa, Harris sought to capitalize on her strong performance in the first Democratic-primary debates. Last month, in the twenty-four hours that followed her heated exchange with Joe Biden, Harris’s campaign raised two million dollars online. Soon after, she surged to second place in three polls of likely Democratic voters, claiming the momentum that the former Vice-President had lost. (About half a million dollars for the Harris campaign over the quarter came from selling online merchandise, including T-shirts that featured the applause line of the debate: “And that little girl was me.”)

This week, at town halls in Des Moines and Sioux City, and even at the houseparty in Indianola, Harris continued using the prosecutorial rhetoric that has defined her, sharpening her stump speech to include a passage where she declares Trump a “coward” whom she would hold to account. “I have prosecuted the big banks who preyed on homeowners, prosecuted pharmaceutical companies who preyed on seniors, prosecuted transnational criminal organizations that preyed on women and children. And I will tell you, we have a predator living in the White House,” she said. At one point, a voice from the crowd shouted, “We love you, forty-six.” She smiled and replied, “Not yet, though.”

Harris’s most compelling trait in Iowa, however, was her relaxed and fluid stage presence. As she worked the crowd in Indianola, the former Vice-President stood behind a lectern, more than sixty miles away, reading from a teleprompter at a Best Western in Marshalltown. In Harris’s interactions with voters, she manages at once to deliver her memorized applause lines and to project an air of informality. She greets the intern seated in the front row, waves to the adorable baby, proffers a “bless you” to the unseen sneeze. In Indianola, she didn’t flinch at the sudden, unexpected reply to a rhetorical question she asked about what the nation has experienced under the current Administration. “Bullshit!” a college student shouted, to hoots and cheers. Harris calmly smiled. “Call it for what it is,” she replied. “I call it that, too.”

Ashley Raske, an African-American office manager from Des Moines, attended Harris’s event with her in-laws, who are white, and her three sons, who are biracial. She had watched Harris in the debates and marvelled at “how much of a boss she was.” “I don’t think she’s scared,” Raske told me. “I don’t think she’s one who’s easily intimidated.” David Kitsis, a retired telephone technician, caucused for Hillary Clinton in 2016. This cycle, he hopes to attend as many events as possible before deciding on the candidate who has the best chance of winning the primary. Might that be Kamala? “I think Trump is scared of her,” he said. “I really do.”

In Iowa, seven months before the first caucuses, the Fourth of July events showcased the charms and quirks of every candidate visiting the state. In Ames, Bernie Sanders indulged selfie requests with visible impatience. In Independence, Joe Biden smooched babies and jogged along the route of an annual parade, as if to show his vitality. In Des Moines, at a Cubs Game, Beto O’Rourke gravitated toward a group of young people, asked what they were drinking, and, when one of them offered him her can of Leinenkugel’s Summer Shandy, took a sip.

After Harris’s speech at the houseparty, she welcomed members of the crowd, one by one, into the shade under the roofed porch to pose for selfies. Some fans had brought copies of “The Truths We Hold,” her memoir. Ida Lewison, a seven-year-old from Kansas who had read that Harris’s mother used to make Special K cookies, handed the senator a box of the cereal. Harris signed the back of the box in teal Sharpie, appending a note to her autograph: “Ida, thank you for your strength!” (Inevitably, on social media, both Harris’s campaign and her husband shared images of the exchange.) That morning, at a parade in Independence, the same young girl had asked Beto to sign a poster and Biden to sign her jean jacket. (Both obliged, the latter after securing her mother’s permission.) “I think that Kamala and Beto both had really good answers,” Ida told me. Biden, she added, “didn’t really give me any answers. He just signed my jacket.”

Nichole Poindexter-Wilson, an Indianola local attending the houseparty, works as the treasurer of her family’s flooring business. “I was a Cory Booker fan, but I might be a Kamala Harris fan at the moment,” she told me, after getting a photograph. “Even my dad said that if there was anyone who could beat Trump, it would be her. And he’s a Republican.”

In Indianola, Harris’s charm worked on a former Trump supporter. Mike Kaldenberg, a retired Air Force officer from Winterset, Iowa, had heard about the party from his wife, a former Hillary Clinton supporter who was out of town caring for a relative. In 2016, Kaldenberg had voted for Trump. “My military training told me that what Hillary did with her e-mails was strategically poisonous,” he said. “I just couldn’t. She should have known better.” Kaldenberg’s frustration with Trump’s tariffs, and their devastating effect on the state’s farmers, have caused him to sour on the President. “The more I learned about it, the more I thought, I really screwed up. I didn’t have any facts at the time.” Kaldenberg now hopes the Democrats will “come out here” and “stump the heck” out of Iowa. “I think Joe probably has been around a little too long, and Bernie won’t last very long. I love Pete, but Kamala—she’s a smart woman, a very smart woman. I don’t see her as a politician. And I don’t think people want politicians anymore. They want common-sense people. People that aren’t bought. People that can’t be bought.”