When’s the last time you saw Democrats having fun the way they did in Atlanta Tuesday night—looking like they actually wanted to be there, looking like they had the wind at their backs? “We have a fight in front of us, and we are the underdogs in this race,” Kamala Harris acknowledged to a fired-up rally crowd of supporters Tuesday. But, she said, “the momentum in this race is shifting.”

That much seemed clear as she spoke in the swing state. With Megan thee Stallion and Quavo providing star power and Georgia Senator Raphael Warnock rousing his home audience, Harris was greeted with remarkable enthusiasm when she took the stage. The vice president gave the stump speech she’s used a couple times now since replacing Joe Biden as the presumptive Democratic nominee, including during a rally last week in Wisconsin. After she ran through the “perpetrators of all kinds” she took down as a prosecutor, the audience could barely wait for her to get to the signature line of her early campaign before they started cheering: “So hear me when I say, I know Donald Trump’s type!” But it was a new epilogue that provided the line of the night. Noting that Trump has begun waffling on debating her but has lobbed personal attacks on her from his own rally stage and on social media, Harris addressed her opponent directly: “Well, Donald, I do hope you’ll reconsider to meet me on the debate stage,” she said. “Because, as the saying goes, if you’ve got something to say, say it to my face.”

Trump—not too long ago looking like he would be cake walking to victory in November—appears to be caught flat-footed, still struggling to find a line of attack against his new opponent. “She’s plain weird,” Trump told Fox News’ Laura Ingraham Tuesday, trying to repurpose the dig Democrats have recently adopted against him, JD Vance, and other Republicans. “I don’t need concerts or entertainers,” he posted after Harris’s rally, calling her “Crazy Kamala.” “I just have to MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!!!” His allies aren’t doing much better: Some of their attacks against her have seemed like accidental pro-Harris ads, while others have reinforced the Democrats’ “Republicans are weird”angle: “When a man votes for a woman,” the Fox News host Jesse Watters riffed recently, “he actually transitions into a woman.”

Harris’s honeymoon won’t last forever, of course. Trump and the Republicans will refine their attacks or at least intensify them. And the Harris coalition—currently unified and enthusiastic—still has divides that can be brought back to the fore by her choice of a running mate and as she lays out the particulars of her agenda. Even as her movement soars, political reality still exerts a gravitational pull. And yet, it’s worth appreciating what’s happening here, something remarkable, because of who Harris is and what she represents. But it’s also something remarkably straightforward: Surveys had consistently shown Americans to be gloomy about the prospects of a Biden-Trump rematch, with Democrats, in particular, telling pollsters again and again and again that they believed Biden needed to pass the torch. For months, even after his dreadful debate performance, Biden and his party tried to swim against that current of popular opinion—insisting they knew better or even that the polls were wrong.

But now, the Democratic Party is giving the voters what they wanted and are being rewarded for it: About eight in 10 Democrats say they’re pleased with the top of the ticket in a new AP-NORC survey, up from a dismal four in 10 in June. Trump’s lead in national and swing state polls has seemed to narrow or even close, and Democratic fundraising has been off the charts. And then, there is the kind of energy we saw in Atlanta on Tuesday. All cycle, Democrats had been steeling themselves to mount a goal-line stand against Trump. Now, it seems like the Democrats are actually on offense. “This is like Barack Obama 2008 on steroids for me,” one Georgia voter told the Associated Press at the Atlanta rally Tuesday. “I would have voted for President Biden again. But we are ready.”