Editor’s note: This is the debut of Austin Murphy’s “Political Pulse” column, which will reflect what’s on the minds of North Bay voters heading into the 2024 election.

Vice President Kamala Harris was in a neighboring state, getting ready to rev up another packed house — this one in Las Vegas.

But her presence was strongly felt Saturday at Santa Rosa’s Church of the Roses, site of the California Statewide Conference for the National Organization for Women (NOW), where brand new Harris-Walz buttons were pinned to many a garment, and conversations often turned to the recently reconstituted Democratic ticket: Harris and Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, he of the camo ball cap and prodigious “Dad Energy.”

President Joe Biden’s decision to step aside and pass the torch to Harris has defibrillated the Democratic Party. That was reflected in a New York Times/Siena College poll published Saturday, showing Harris leading former President Donald Trump in the “Blue Wall” states of Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin.

And it was evident at the NOW conference, where more than 100 attendees exuded a hopefulness and optimism about the November election that had been missing a month earlier.

“I was stuck in grieving mode,” recalled Marsha Vas Dupre, a former Santa Rosa City Council member. But Nancy Pelosi interceded, Biden took one for the team, “and the happiness came back.”

In the days and weeks after Biden’s train-wreck debate with Trump on June 27, as the president’s chances of reelection shrunk, “we were disappointed and deflated,” said Camerina Schwartz Davidson, president of California NOW.

The emergence of Harris, a biracial candidate poised to become America’s first female president, “is like a dream come true for a lot of people,” she said. “It couldn’t have happened in a more serendipitous way than it’s happening right now.”

As the conference approached, Schwartz Davidson recalled, “we were hoping to energize our members” — a task made more difficult by the struggles of the octogenarian incumbent.

The change “has invigorated and energized” members “into wanting to get out the vote.” It also drove bigger turnout at this year’s Statewide Conference, hosted by Sonoma County NOW, whose indefatigable treasurer, Elaine B. Holtz, lined up the day’s speakers.

“The event sold out,” said Schwartz Davidson. “We haven’t sold out in a long time.”

Lurking behind all the hope and optimism was the specter of what happened the last time a woman was favored to beat Trump.

Yes, she recalls Hillary Clinton’s come-from-ahead loss to Trump eight years ago, said Bear Atwood, vice president of NOW.

“I’m still recovering from that. I was a delegate for Hillary in 2016,” recalled Atwood, a civil rights lawyer and former legal director for the ACLU of Mississippi, where she lives.

“I don’t think we were overconfident. I think we were complacent. There’s a difference.”

Asked if 2024 feels different, Atwood said “It’s our job to make SURE it’s different. It’s a long time to November, and we have a lot of work to do to get people to harness all this energy and enthusiasm and take it to the polls.”

Atwood was followed on the rostrum by Santa Rosa’s own Molly Murphy MacGregor, who in 1980 cofounded the National Women’s History Project, which aimed to “write women back into history.”

MaDonna Feather Cruz, a Sonoma County Native American leader, advocate and social justice warrior, shared her life story, embodying the resilience many will need to call on, should Harris and Walz fall short.

While there were no religious services on the program, the call and response during Dr. Kim Hester Williams’ speech made it feel, at times, like church.

Williams, a professor of literature at Sonoma State University, had harked back earlier in her address to Trump’s 2016 win over Clinton, a galling result for this audience in particular.

Unlike some of her colleagues, Williams recalled, she’d seen that Trump victory coming a mile away.

“I just want you to know that my feeling has shifted,” Williams told the audience, referring to the 2024 election. “I feel certain,” she said, referring to Harris’ chances …

“C’mon sister!” shouted one boisterous NOW member.

“ … As certain as I felt back then.”

“Oh yes! Oh yes!”

One major difference this time around, Williams believes, will be the engagement and passion of young voters alarmed by the climate crisis and the erosion of women’s reproductive rights.

Beneath Democrats’ newfound enthusiasm, at the conference and in the country, lies the shared, grim conviction that the stakes in November will be stratospheric.

As Schwartz Davidson put it:

“We understand this election will matter more than any other in our history, and comes at a time when we have fewer rights than our grandmothers.”

During her afternoon workshop defining and underscoring the importance of active advocacy — not to be confused with “performative allyship” — Dr. Addie Ellis read from her collection of essays, “Black Butterfly.”

Ellis shared an excerpt from a speech — a polemic, really — delivered by W.E.B. Du Bois in 1905. A towering intellect, Du Bois was the first Black person to earn a Ph.D. from Harvard, and went on to become a founder of the NAACP.

The passage Ellis read aloud, 119 years after Du Bois wrote it, seemed especially relevant in the late summer of 2024:

“Either the United States will destroy ignorance or ignorance will destroy the United States.”

You can reach Staff Writer Austin Murphy at [email protected] or on Twitter @ausmurph88.