They were seeing a test run for power: how a love story plays in focus groups, how a partner’s poise reads on camera, how a kiss on a courthouse step might double as a soft campaign rollout. Yet what unfolded in Kauai and Washington and Newark didn’t look like a pollster’s storyboard. It looked like two people insisting on a life small enough to be real and big enough to hold both of their callings. The pastries, the foster dog, the family photos under the huppah all whispered the same refusal: to let ambition swallow the ordinary.

If the country someday calls them to a bigger stage, the footage will already exist — the barefoot proposal, the shared prayers, the quiet signatures. But the real campaign began long before any slogan: in a man learning that purpose without joy is hollow, and in a woman choosing to walk beside him before any promise of a podium.