She had me at “emotional support chickens.”

My friend Susan Kaufman was telling me about a yarn store in Inglewood where a multiracial, multigenerational crowd gathers twice a week to commune and knit. The store’s owner has created do-it-yourself knitting kits for overstuffed chickens with fanciful names like Baraaawk Obama, Hennifer Lopez and Paulina Poultryskova.

When you hug one of the chickens, Susan assured me, you would forget, at least for a moment, that a convicted felon, racist and fraudster might retake the White House in November.

“It sounds weird, but they really work,” said Susan, a therapist who knows about emotional support.

When she first invited me to tag along with her to the Knitting Tree, President Biden had not yet announced he was dropping out of the presidential race. Vice President Kamala Harris had not yet exploded into the national spotlight. And former President Trump was campaigning as if he had already won.

I needed some poultry therapy.

By the time I walked into the Knitting Tree a few weeks later, however, the depressing political landscape had seismically shifted, and so had the mood inside the store, said the store’s owner, Annette Corsino.

“Before this, the mood was pretty grim,” said Corsino, 62, whose lavender curls and plethora of tattoos telegraph the ascendance of a hipper knitting generation. “But people are feeling much better now. They’re smiling more. There’s hope.”

I hugged Baraaawk Obama to my chest. It felt good, really good.

Corsino nodded approvingly. “Our motto is: ‘Life is hard. We all need a chicken to make it better.’ ”

The Knitting Tree is located in a drab low-slung office park sandwiched between a car rental place and a golf apparel outlet on Manchester Boulevard. It looks super boring on the outside.

Entering the shop, though, is like walking into a Technicolor Oz. Brilliant spools of yarn line the walls, and therapy chickens perch on high shelves. Walter and Carmen, Corsino’s wire-haired dachshunds, wander about. Carmen barks at everyone; Walter climbs into laps and perches his long nose on the huge wood table that is the heart of the store. The table is where knitters and crocheters — young, middle-aged, elderly, Black, white, Asian and Latino — work and talk and laugh. And sometimes cry. Two of the knitters are nursing ailing husbands.

This place seemed like a multiracial version of a traditional Black barbershop.

“Actually, no,” said Jacqueline Camacho, 70, who worked for 46 years as an airline customer service agent at LAX. “It’s more of a family affair.” Camacho lives in Valencia and comes to Inglewood as often as she can.

“More like ‘Cheers,’ ” added Ana Petrova, 83, who fled Hungary after the 1956 revolution was crushed by the Soviet army and ended up in Venice, where she and her husband, Peter, operated a business on Lincoln Boulevard, selling and repairing British cars.

“At the barbershop,” said Camacho, “they just gossip and gossip, and we don’t do that here.”

“Everybody knows your name,” said Petrova. “And sometimes we do drink.” (During Wednesday evening potlucks, mostly, although sometimes on Sundays, too. I spied a bottle of Champagne on the nearby food table.)

Camacho was asking Petrova what to do about a stitch she dropped while knitting a sweater.

Creations at the Knitting Tree LA with a political theme.

(Robin Abcarian / Los Angeles Times)

“Where is it?” asked Petrova.

“Under the armpit,” Camacho replied.

“Live with it.”

Later, I heard Petrova give a knitter advice that could apply to almost any of life’s challenges: “The slower you go, the faster you’ll finish.”

Toward the front of the store, a class was working on a felted tote bag with the blue-and-white “Greek key” design familiar to anyone who has ever bought a cup of coffee in Manhattan.

“It’s fun to nerd out about Greek mythology,” said knitting teacher Theresa Havton, a mother of four adult sons, including triplets. I guessed that her singleton was the first born. “It would not have happened any other way,” said Havton, a former computer engineer, whose husband is a spinal cord surgeon who practices in New York.

“We have a brain trust here,” Corsino told me. “We have doctors, lawyers, nurses, scientists, lots of engineers. During the strike, we had a lot of film industry people. I never see anybody outside of here. This is my social life.”

At the big table, Anjeanette Bumatai, 54, was working on a blanket. She wore a blue baseball cap pulled low over her forehead and a “Babes Ride Out” T-shirt. Bumatai owns an insurance agency, rides a Harley and had just returned from a gathering of female bikers in Deadwood, S.D. During her two weeks on the road, she said, she rode through Nevada, Idaho and Wyoming.

“I was in Trump country,” she told me. “It’s amazing how much people adore him. It’s a cult of personality. I would talk to someone and say, ‘What has he done for you?’ They can’t name anything. As a person of color, I think the majority of Black people do not care for him.”

She sounded suspiciously like a childless cat lady, the infamous insult lobbed at Harris, stepmother of two, by Trump’s running mate, Sen. JD Vance of Ohio.

“I guess I am!” she said, laughing. “I guess my husband’s kids don’t matter.”

Corsino, who has sold more than 3,000 emotional support chicken kits — at $39.50 a pop — and 25,000 chicken patterns, told me she is working on a new pattern, based on a popular Harris campaign meme inspired by the British pop star Charli XCX.

Borrowing the shape of the celebrated pink pussy hat popularized during the anti-Trump Women’s March of January 2017, this one will be lime green. Black lettering will spell out the word “BRAT.”

@robinkabcarian

Sen. Mark Kelly, D-Ariz., who is a top contender to be Vice President Harris’ running mate in the 2024 election, posted a cryptic message on social media amid veepstakes speculation.

“Whether it was from my time in the Navy and at NASA, serving in the United States Senate, or visiting our troops overseas: I’ve learned that when your country asks you to serve, you always answer the call,” Kelly posted on X on Sunday.

Harris met with potential vice presidential candidate picks on Sunday as the presumptive Democrat presidential nominee is believed to be a day or two away from making a final decision on a running mate.

Among those on the list are Govs. Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania and Tim Walz of Minnesota, as well as Kelly. Also in contention, according to sources, are Govs. Andy Beshear of Kentucky and JB Pritzker of Illinois, and Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg.

VP CONTENDER MARK KELLY DODGES QUESTIONS ON KAMALA HARRIS’ POLICY FLIP-FLOPS

Kelly shared his post on Sunday evening, sending the internet into a frenzy about what it could mean.

One user posted the question, “What is happening,” while another posted, “Holy s – – -! It’s you! Are you telling us you’ve been selected for VP, Mark Kelly?”

The posts continued to drop as users let their imaginations run wild.

HARRIS’ BORDER REMARKS HAUNT DOWN-BALLOT DEMS AS LAKE AD PREVIEWS GOP GENERAL ELECTION STRATEGY

“It appears Mark Kelly is the VP pick,” a user wrote.

Some users could not wait to see Kelly debate Republican VP pick JD Vance, calling the latter a “former tech bro” and the former an astronaut.

“My head is spinning. Is Sen. Mark Kelly still in the running or is he out of it,” another user wrote while sharing an animated GIF of Gene Wilder’s version of Willy Wonka. “The palace intrigue is getting old. I hope we know who the running mate is by tomorrow at the latest.”

REPUBLICANS LAMBASTE BIDEN FOR ISRAEL WEAPONS DELAYS: ‘STOP ACCOMMODATING IRAN’

VP Harris is said to be a day or two away from announcing her pick for running mate. (ALLISON JOYCE/AFP via Getty Images)

Still, some users were even more confused when they shared a screen grab of a post from Kelly on Sunday afternoon that was later deleted.

The post read, “My background is a bit different than most politicians. I spent my life serving in the Navy and at NASA, where the mission always comes first. No, my mission is serving Arizonans.”

Those confused by the two posts wanted to know: which one is it?

Fox News Digital reached out to both Harris and Kelly but did not immediately hear back.

Vice President Kamala Harris’ late entry into the presidential race against former President Trump reset the political playing field in important ways, giving Democrats a promising boost in polling and a huge infusion of cash and volunteers. But it didn’t change everything.

In a nation of more than 330 million people, the 2024 election — just like the 2016 and 2020 elections before it — will almost certainly be decided by a relatively small number of voters in a handful of battleground states, political experts said.

When Hillary Clinton lost to Trump in 2016, it was by fewer than 80,000 votes across Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania combined. When President Biden beat Trump in 2020, it was by fewer than 50,000 votes across Wisconsin, Arizona and Georgia.

Now, Harris is in a high-speed race to start executing her own path to victory through the nation’s battlegrounds, which include Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin — three of the “blue wall” of states that lean Democratic — and Georgia, North Carolina and Arizona, in the nation’s Sun Belt. This week, she is expected to pick her running mate — possibly from one of those states — and begin holding major rallies in places such as Philadelphia, Detroit, Raleigh, N.C., and Savannah, Ga.

Amid the high-stakes number-crunching that campaigns always do to determine their best path to victory, the Harris campaign is citing polls showing her closing the gap with Trump in nearly every battleground, and seeming more bullish than Biden’s campaign ever did. On the question of whether Harris might focus on the blue wall or the Sun Belt, her campaign’s answer has been both.

In a call with reporters last week, the campaign’s battleground states director, Dan Kanninen, said the flood of support for Harris across the country included 360,000 new volunteers and $200 million in donations during the first week of her candidacy — two-thirds of which was from new donors.

On Friday, the Harris campaign said that it had $377 million in cash on hand — compared with $327 million for Trump — and that it would be spending hard and fast to ramp up the fight.

Kanninen said the campaign is rapidly expanding an already large network of Biden-Harris field offices and volunteers across the battleground states. He said that there were 600 staffers “on the ground in the blue wall,” and that 150 more would be added by mid-August. Aides also planned to double the size of the campaign’s teams in Arizona and North Carolina, and were opening new field offices in Georgia.

Volunteers were fanning out to knock on doors, and being trained on how best to spur pro-Harris conversations online.

“We’re making these investments across the entire map because the data is clear: We have multiple pathways to 270 electoral votes,” Kanninen said. “The vice president is strong in both the blue wall and in the Sun Belt, and we are running hard in both.”

The Trump campaign did not respond to a request for comment on its strategy for battleground states.

In the American electoral system, voters cast ballots to elect the president, but the candidate who receives the most votes nationally is not necessarily the winner. Clinton, for example, received about 2.9 million more votes than Trump, and still lost.

That’s because the candidate who wins the most individual votes in a state receives all of that state’s electoral votes, in what’s known as the electoral college. The number of electoral votes per state is determined by population, with the most populous states — such as California — receiving the most.

In order to win an election today, a presidential candidate must secure 270 electoral votes, and different presidents have gotten there through different pathways. Barack Obama famously pulled together a broad coalition of voters, flipping nine previously red states to blue in 2008.

Clinton was confident going into the 2016 election, riding polls that appeared strongly in her favor, only to have her campaign’s swing-state strategy — she never campaigned in Wisconsin — ridiculed by some political analysts after her stunning defeat. In 2020, Biden managed to undo some of the damage to the Democratic Party, taking back several key battleground states while flipping Arizona and Georgia — but by closer margins and via a narrower path to victory than Obama‘s in 2008 and 2012.

Political experts, pollsters and other veterans of presidential races said that given Harris’ resources, it makes sense for the campaign to cast a wide net and fight in as many swing states as possible. But they have different takes on how she might get to 270 — or fall short.

Robert Alexander, a professor of political science at Bowling Green State University in Ohio and author of “Representation and the Electoral College,” has long studied presidential paths to victory on the electoral map.

“Harris’ entry has changed the complexion of states up for grabs, I would say, from where Biden was — and it’s made it more amenable for Democrats. Certain states seemed to be slipping away [under Biden], and some of the early polling would say that they are now back in grasp for a Harris-led ticket,” Alexander said. “That’s a pretty significant shift in a pretty quick time period.”

He said that Pennsylvania — with 19 electoral votes, which Clinton lost and Biden won — is a “pretty key state in all of this right now,” and that there will no doubt be “money dumped” into campaigning there.

But he also expects Harris, buoyed by new energy and enthusiasm, to invest in driving up turnout in the South, in part to force Trump — who had been preparing to “run up the scoreboard” on Biden — back into a defensive posture.

Kyle Kondik, a political analyst at the Center for Politics at the University of Virginia, said both Harris and Trump appear focused, correctly, on the seven states that were decided by 3 percentage points or less in the last election: Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin in the blue wall; Georgia, North Carolina and Arizona in the Sun Belt; and Nevada.

In 2020, Biden won six out of the seven, while Trump took North Carolina — and all of them are up for grabs in 2024, Kondik said.

Before Biden dropped out, Kondik had been watching the president’s numbers falling fast in the blue wall swing states, and considered the decline a deadly sign for the Biden campaign. “If he lost in any of them, he wasn’t going to win,” Kondik said.

He said the same probably holds true for Harris, but that may change if her numbers keep going up in North Carolina and Georgia.

“The jury’s out on that,” he said.

This colorful endorsement of Harris went up recently in Madison, the capital of Wisconsin. The crucial swing state helped Trump win the presidency in 2016 — and lose it in 2020.

(Kayla Wolf / Associated Press)

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Cornell Belcher, a pollster who worked for both Obama campaigns, said Harris may not be able to restore Obama’s broad coalition. But it “makes all the sense in the world” for her to follow Obama’s strategy of “pressing for expansion” on the electoral map, he said — “going more places and making Republicans play defense more.”

Harris has to “secure the blue wall, hard stop,” Belcher said, and will definitely be paying attention to — and spending time in — Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania.

But given her brimming campaign coffers, he said, she also has the “opportunity to go on the offensive” in other vulnerable places.

North Carolina, which Obama had flipped blue, more recently elected a Democratic governor in Roy Cooper, and may see diminished Republican turnout given GOP primary voters’ selection of far-right candidates in down-ballot races, Belcher said.

“It’s absolutely an opportunity if you have the resources,” he said of the Harris campaign. “And again, they have the resources.”

Georgia, he said, is also in play, with a “well-educated, upwardly mobile population and a growing segment of minority voters” who flipped both of the state’s U.S. Senate seats blue in the last election.

“For Democrats to not tap in to these changing dynamics within these states,” Belcher said, “would be malpractice.”

Harris doesn’t have a lot of time, but Belcher and others said it’s unclear how relevant that is. This race has been moving at lightning speed, the trajectory of polling in several states turned on a dime in the last couple of weeks, and Harris’ favorability ratings shot up in record time after Biden endorsed her.

“We’re in uncharted waters,” Belcher said. “There are no road maps for all of this.”

Alexander, of Bowling Green, said he still believes that Harris has a “tougher path” to winning than Trump due to the nature of the electoral college system — and he worries 2024 could be another “misfire election,” with Trump winning the electoral college despite Harris winning the popular vote.

“In a different time,” Alexander said, “it would be seen as a constitutional crisis.”