“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.

The marquee donors are already lining up—__ J.J. Abrams__ and Shonda Rhimes recently hosted an event for her at Abrams’s house, and celebrities including Ben Affleck, Evan Rachel Wood, and Reese Witherspoon (along with a half-dozen Gettys) have opened up their wallets. But—very important—it’s not like 2015, when the whole of Hollywood basically coalesced around Hillary Clinton early in the money chase. “Note that they’re giving maybe $2,800,” says a Democratic bundler in Beverly Hills. “Or, if they’re feeling generous, something north of that—maybe $5,600, the legal cap—and no one’s bundling for her yet.”

Then along comes Pete Buttigieg, the 37-year-old mayor of South Bend, Indiana, and suddenly Hollywood is in love all over again. Everyone is calling him “the flavor of the month.” But, says the talent manager, “A month ago, they called him ‘the flavor of the week.’” Another Democratic activist who has helped most of the major presidential candidates raise money said: “Mayor Pete is totally catching fire. He’s exciting. He appears to be some sort of super-genius, and he’s authentic, and he’s young, and he has humility while doing this audacious thing, and he’s gay.”

In a city attuned to spectacle and narrative, Buttigieg feels (what’s the word?) real: Rhodes Scholar, vet, polyglot, Middle American demolisher of glass ceilings whom everyone—everyone—is dying to see go mano a mano with the president on a debate stage. Next month, Gwyneth Paltrow will co-host, with Bradley Whitford of West Wing fame, a Buttigieg fund-raiser. On June 18, the mayor returns to L.A. for a fund-raiser hosted by Michael Kives—the former CAA agent who represented Kate Hudson, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and Jessica Alba and now runs an investment consulting firm, K5 Global—and Kives’s wife at their Laurel Canyon home. The next day, Buttigieg is expected to attend a fund-raiser hosted by writer-director-producer Ryan Murphy (Nip/Tuck, Eat Pray Love) and his husband, David Miller. Co-sponsors include CAA partner Bryan Lourd and writer-director-producer Greg Berlanti (Dawson’s Creek, Love, Simon). The excitement is palpable.

But Harris, unlike Buttigieg, has an obvious path to the Democratic nomination, which starts, naturally, in California. In September 2017, then-California governor Jerry Brown signed a bill moving the state’s 2020 primary election up three months, to March 3—Super Tuesday. “What people aren’t understanding is that it’s not just California being a primary state in early March,” says an L.A.-based Democratic political consultant. “It’s that early voting starts in early February. If the momentum is even a little bit on her side, that’s going to be a big piece.” By March 4, the day after, she’ll be catapulted to the top of the pack, marching into Louisiana, Maine, Ohio, Michigan—and then the Democratic National Convention in Milwaukee. Or so the argument goes.

And yet, the economics of presidential politicking in Hollywood are shifting. While Harris has long ties to the local power elite—she’s raised more than $1.7 million from the entertainment industry over the last decade—the progressive base has grown increasingly skeptical of the high-dollar circuit. Once upon a time, White House hopefuls flew to L.A., met with the Big Three—Jeffrey Katzenberg, David Geffen, and Haim Saban—and everyone else sort of fell into line. Now, the money is more diffuse, and the new power brokers are younger, not so ideologically rigid, more practical, more . . . millennial. They like that Mayor Pete sounds more like them and that he’s not a coastal elite. (Apologies, Kamala.) They like that he’s more substantive than Beto O’Rourke, who sounds (how to put this gingerly?) like a character in a Douglas Coupland novel. They get that he could totally flame out before the summer or Iowa or—who knows?—California, but right now, they’re impressed, because Mayor Pete seems to get that to beat Trump, you can’t run against the people who voted for him. You need them, or at least some of them, and not just in Scranton and Racine.

“This thing Mayor Pete’s been saying about generational change in politics is something I’ve long believed in as well,” said a Beverly Hills talent agent who’s been active in Democratic politics since graduating from college in the early aughts. “The politics of division and destruction and of denying what’s fact is just an old way of doing things, and I think the younger generations are just ready to get shit done.”

For a long time after the 2016 presidential election, the loosely knit confederation of producers, directors, writers, and A-listers who helped bankroll Clinton’s campaign was in a clinical state. Outraged. Grieving. In a sprawling fetal position that stretched from Hancock Park to the Palisades. They were not that different from the tens of millions of Clinton voters who woke up on November 9, unsure of whether this was still America—college-educated women, people of color, the island of Manhattan, the Pacific Northwest, the vast networks of abortion-rights activists and union organizers and millennial canvassers that coursed through the Rust Belt and Broward County and Houston and D.C. suburbs and hundreds of progressive hubs and hamlets across the great, undulating middle of the American hinterland. But for Hollywood, it was more (how to put this?) felt. They knew Hillary. They texted with her. They had hosted her in their backyards. They’d bundled. They’d been tight with Bill since, like, forever. Plus, they were sure that Nate Silver had this thing nailed. And everyone they talked to, which was mostly each other, thought the same thing.

Now, as the shell shock of 2016 recedes, and the prospect of knocking off Drumpf in 2020 becomes more real, more palpable, everyone is looking forward to Miami—the debate. Like Romans waiting for a fresh batch of gladiators to maul themselves to death. Let the best pretender to the throne win.

“People are gun-shy after 2016,” said Dana Perlman, a Beverly Hills attorney who bundled millions of dollars combined for Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. “They expected the candidate with the biggest name recognition and deepest policy positions, with the most financial support and the majority of voters, to come out on top, and that didn’t happen. So a lot of people, myself included, are trying to figure out how the process plays out now in this uncharted territory. Ordinarily, I would not have taken seriously anyone who was a mayor of a midsize city from Indiana. Are you kidding me, in a pool with the former vice president and all these senators? It’s a different world now.”

Billy Ray noted that he’s writing stump speeches for two of the Democrats running for the White House. “And they know about each other,” he said. (Ray declined to say whom he was helping.)

Michael Kives, the former CAA agent, bundled about $3 million for Clinton in 2016, but, so far this cycle, has stayed neutral. “There’s a lot of energy in the party, in Hollywood, in the country, I think, for this next generation of Democratic leaders,” Kives said. “From Kamala to Cory to Mayor Pete to Beto to Stacey Abrams, there’s real excitement and passion.”

(Also worth noting: Bundling has become something of a game. Bundlers compete with each other to out-raise each other, and everyone knows how much their donors are giving. New fund-raising software enables bundlers to get real-time updates. “I’ll be on my phone talking to somebody who’s supposed to be giving,” said a Democratic bundler, “and he’ll say, ‘Already made my donation,’ and I’ll know he’s lying, and I’ll be laughing and say, ‘No, you didn’t.’”)

There’s also a growing realization—which seems obvious, but is only now coming into focus—that Hollywood, with all its storytelling prowess, its capacity to evoke, can channel that power into reaching voters ordinarily repulsed by, well, Hollywood. Last year, Ray collaborated with writer Gregg Hurwitz and writer-director-producer Marshall Herskovitz to advise 30 Democrats running in red House districts on how to connect with G.O.P. voters. Twenty-one of them won, in part, by making Democratic arguments on Republican terms.

“Essentially, we look at ways that conservatives and liberals differ in Big Five personality traits,” Hurwitz explained—openness to new experiences, conscientiousness, extroversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism. “What I specialize in is re-framing classically liberal values through a high-conscientiousness lens or argument. They are still the values that I—and the majority of Democrats—hold, but we seek to express them with arguments that are pro-business, aspirational, freedom-oriented.”

Hurwitz added that this new approach—candidates speaking to voters who generally disagree with them in a language that those voters can relate to—jibes with that of Mayor Pete. “His ‘democratic capitalism’ has a lot aligned with our notion of ‘smart capitalism.’”

One Democrat whom Ray, Hurwitz, and Herskovitz advised was Elissa Slotkin, who recently appeared at a congressional panel discussion at the Paramount lot on Melrose Avenue. Slotkin, now a freshman congresswoman representing a G.O.P.-leaning district in all-important Michigan, is worried Democrats have not learned the lesson of 2018—which, in her view, was that winning over Republicans, and avoiding a repeat of 2016, meant talking about the things that all voters care about, and not indulging in impeachment fantasies. Or shredding other Democrats.

“I just can’t stand the circular firing squad going on between Democrats right now,” she said. “I’m so concerned that, with so many candidates and with so much vitriol that has entered our dialogue with each other, that we’re going to cut these candidates to ribbons and give the other side all the fodder they need, and it’s like walking into a trap.”