My wife spends more time trekking through the internet swamp than I. When she informed me a few weeks ago the alphabet generations have adopted the term “rizz” as a shorthand for charisma, she also warned me the terminology may already be fading as a “thing.” For the sake of discussion, let’s ride with it. The notion of charisma comes in several flavors. For musicians, comedians, athletes and Hollywood idols, the personal qualities which attract fans are intrinsic to the individuals we admire. They may be sexy, clever, funny, attractive or compelling, but their rizz is transmitted outward and sprayed across their fandom. It’s a top-down transmission.

After 50 years in the trenches, I’ve reached the conclusion political rizz travels from the grassroots up to candidates during campaigns. They aren’t blessed with rizz, they embrace it. This is why landslide elections catch both pundits and the public by surprise. Much like the oceanic earthquakes that spawn a tsunami, no one could anticipate them before we developed seismic monitors. The first warning arrived as the surf slid away from the beach beneath the incoming tidal wave that swept everything and everyone ashore. Before I proceed to recounting specific campaigns, I will venture out on a limb and predict Vice President Kamala Harris will win the November election in a landslide so large nobody can deny it, with the sole exception of former President Donald Trump. Just as dogs start howling minutes before an earthquake is felt, my internal seismic detector is flashing rizz red.

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Political landslides are rare occurrences and may result from circumstances that have little or nothing to do with a candidate’s rizz quotient. Franklin Roosevelt would have won his 1932 presidential election, even if he wasn’t a mesmerizing orator, following the stock market crash of 1929. Hoover became the first candidate to claim the nation’s economics were basically sound in the face of an obvious market collapse. This claim worked no better for John McCain in 2008. Barack Obama, a black man whose candidacy was viewed by many as a bizarre mistake on the part of Democrats, drew just a thousand supporters in the spring of the year at the Jefferson County airport in Broomfield. The only surprise was the eloquence of his wife, Michele, which rivaled his own. By fall, I sat on the steps of the State Capitol in Denver witnessing a sea of humanity reaching the City and County Building estimated by police as a quarter-of-a-million Coloradans hanging on Obama’s every word.

I first heard Obama’s name in the U S. Senate cafeteria in Washington during the spring of 2004. I was slurping my bowl of Senate navy bean soup when a group of black women commandeered the next table. Their conversation concerned an earlier meeting that morning with President George W. Bush at the White House. I was unable to discern why or what had taken them there. One asked her companions, “Did you hear what the President said when I asked him if he had met our Senate candidate in Illinois, Barack Obama?” Apparently, he had replied he hadn’t met Obama so she had advised him, “You should, because he will be sitting at your desk one day.”

Closer to home, John Hickenlooper’s run for Denver mayor in 2003 and Federico Peña’s race in 1983 featured candidates who entered their contests with low rizz quotients. In the case of Federico, he announced his candidacy in December of 1982 with just 3% name recognition confronting a 14-year incumbent, Bill McNichols, and District Attorney Dale Tooley. Wellington Webb also jumped into the contest. Yet by St. Patrick’s Day, three months later, when I was invited to join Federico’s campaign staff at a parade party in the basement of a vacant Jake’s Auto Parts store on 14th Street several blocks west of City Hall, 500 supporters were crammed into a stuffy room chanting, “Peña, Peña, Peña!” I recognized few in this crowd — they certainly weren’t Democratic Party regulars.

Those of us who had served in the legislature with Peña as our House minority leader would have said many positive things about him — smart as a whip, articulate, perhaps the best extemporaneous political speaker I’ve ever know personally, and energetic. I’m not sure if anyone would have noted his rizz. He was more of a policy geek. Similarly with Hick, though he had organized a popular campaign demanding the new Broncos stadium remain known as “Mile High” and the fact he was a fun guy to share a beer with, few would have identified him as charismatic. Yet, an offbeat campaign style that featured him feeding parking meters downtown for overtime violators changed perceptions of this saloon keeper. Nonetheless, both were transformed into charisma “hotties.”

In the case of Peña, the demographics of Denver had changed  beneath the feet of the old guard. A yuppie generation didn’t want to live in a cow town known as the Queen City of the Plains. They were aspiring to become a regional capital for the Rocky Mountain west, cosmopolitan enough to elect a young Hispanic lawyer as their mayor. Federico reached out to the gay community, which had long been ignored in Denver politics, and talked about cleaning up the “brown cloud” as part of a larger environmental agenda. He promised a new, world-class airport. Hick’s reputation as a downtown brewpub master offered a more vital downtown, where Denverites could play deep into the night. Voters projected their policy preferences onto both men, seeing in them the rizz they were looking for. In turn, each was adept enough and smart enough to hear those voices and reflect back agendas that met grassroot desires.

So, how does this dynamic apply to Kamala Harris? Voters have had a bellyful of the whining, sniveling nastiness of Donald Trump. They want a president who is proud of America — proud we just won the most Olympic medals — desperate to restore our international respect. They want a president who laughs with us and at herself, who will be thoughtful, and who can hear them. Gov. Tim Walz, her pick for vice president, observed in Denver last week, “Democrats don’t agree on everything, but we still work together to help everyone.” That’s normal. Harris has been training for this job half her life. She’s likely to be good at it. That’s why her rizz score is continuing to rise and damned little Republicans can do to reverse it. Evidence this electricity flows from the voter up is the fact today’s landslide rarely guarantees another come reelection.

In her 2020 campaign book, “The Truths We Hold”, Harris explains her viewpoint this way, “Americans are a hardworking bunch. We pride ourselves on our work ethic. And for generations, most of us have been raised to believe there is nothing more honorable than putting in an honest day’s work to take care of our family. We grew up trusting that when we worked hard and did well, we would be rewarded for our effort. But the truth is… it hasn’t been that way for an awfully long time.”

Quarreling with this perspective will prove a fool’s errand.

Miller Hudson is a public affairs consultant and a former Colorado legislator.