“When Trump got elected, I was flattened for a number of weeks, and a number of people around me felt the same way,” Billy Ray, the screenwriter behind The Hunger Games and Captain Phillips, said. We were sitting at the Beverly Hills Tennis Club, and it was late afternoon, Friday, a few hours before the club was scheduled to host a Passover Seder, and waiters were setting up tables and chairs, arranging platefuls of matzo. “All of a sudden, I was like a kid who had to go to sleepaway camp and couldn’t leave home. I couldn’t eat. I was having a hard time sleeping. I was a mess. And I think it’s because, on some level, I saw the future that was coming, and it’s the future we’re in. I felt we had just put someone who was evil in charge.”

Then the midterms happened. Hollywood, no surprise, helped Democrats flip the House. That left them upbeat. Cautiously optimistic.

Now it’s late April, and we’re winding through Act I of the Democratic primary—the invisible primary, the race to secure money, online infrastructure, star staff—and in Hollywood, it’s basically a two-person race: Kamala Harris versus Mayor Pete Buttigieg. Pretty much everyone else in the Democratic field is background noise. Beto? No substance. Biden? Lots of residual affection, but that shoulders thing—not a good look. Cory? Love him, love him, but that announcement video—W.T.F.? Warren? Sloppy rollout, kind of Bernie-ish. Bernie? Fuck Bernie.

Until recently, it looked like Harris had the lock on La La Land, where she lives with her husband, entertainment lawyer Doug Emhoff. She’d spent years building her L.A. network as the San Francisco D.A., state attorney general, and, since 2017, California’s junior senator. She’d played the game exceedingly well, and she’d honed a public persona that felt alternately gritty and progressive chic.

Harris is prosecutor tough—focused and unwavering, not crazy, Howard Dean mad, but definitely aligned with the soul of the Democratic base in the latter half of Donald Trump’s first term. When she announced her White House run, on Good Morning America, she used the word “fight” three times and “power” four times in her opening, one-minute statement; “strength” and “moral authority” also made an appearance. Harris doesn’t really talk. She tells stories, and she peppers her storytelling with journalistic detail—litigator-like. (Exhibit A: her takedown of the media in her Daily Show appearance earlier this year, which subtly, entertainingly took a jab at institutionalized misogyny while establishing the candidate as serious and empathetic.) On top of all that, Harris is a woman of color at a time when many progressives have vowed not to support any of the white men running for the presidency out of principle. “She checks a shit ton of boxes,” a talent manager active in Democratic politics said.

Perhaps most important for Q-score obsessives, Harris seems to grasp what so many two-term presidents have grasped: that a presidential candidate is not just asking to lead, but to insert oneself into the lives and conversations of hundreds of millions of Americans every day, every night, on our screens and over our dinner tables, into our marital spats and therapy sessions and Thanksgiving repasts, which means—for fuck’s sake, Al Gore—one absolutely cannot be annoying.

But really, really, the thing that Hollywood loves, the thing it keeps coming back to is that word again: fight. When Harris started taking flack from her left flank for being too tough on crime, she proudly defended her record, which sounds terrible to the über-woke, but pretty great to everyone else. All of which is to say that The Industry loves Harris, because, sure, we all have our politics, our pet issues, but really, it wants to win. It wants to crucify Trump, and Harris—Kamala—looks like she can get that done.