Read: Kamala Harris’s campaign strategy: Don’t pick a lane

Many of her opponents are thrilled that that’s how Harris is playing it. With a process this long and intense, they say, Harris can go ahead and be a front-runner. Especially after voters recoiled after Hillary Clinton was effectively anointed in 2016, there is no better way, they argue, for her to not be there at the end.

“The candidate who will win is the candidate who peaks at the right time, and traditionally being the first to peak is not the right time,” said an adviser to one of the other 2020 Democrats.

Harris and her team point to the estimated 22,000 people the California senator managed to pack between police barriers in the streets along Oakland City Hall on Sunday. Or they point to the $1.5 million she raised and the 3 million views of her announcement video in just the first 24 hours. Or that she was the first to accept a CNN invitation to do a televised town hall, Monday night from Des Moines, which is how she’s spending her first trip as a candidate to the first caucus state, rather than going on the barnstorming tours that Elizabeth Warren and Kirsten Gillibrand, among others, opted for.

Read: Kamala Harris’s political memoir is an uneasy fit for the digital era

No matter who else gets into the race, her circle of advisers believe, she’ll be seen as one of the two or three candidates in the top tier. That’s the media narrative they’re stoking. This, they figure, will help her raise more money, which will create the buzz that will stoke the media narrative more. In a field this big, with the number of twists and turns ahead, the perception eventually will become reality. Or so goes their thinking.

They hope Beto O’Rourke was watching her echo Barack Obama and invoke Robert Kennedy on Sunday, and thinking that there’s not a spot for him. They hope Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders and Cory Booker were watching, too, and realizing what it would be like to go up against her. And most of all, they hope there will continue to be paragraphs like this one that treat her as being in the top tier—no small feat for a half-Jamaican, half-Indian woman from Oakland who has been in the Senate for only two years.

Is Harris the candidate to beat? I asked San Francisco Mayor London Breed, making her way out with the crowd while Harris was still shaking hands and taking selfies after leaving the podium.

“I think so right now,” Breed said. “Best speech so far.”

The primary race is still at the stage of candidates welcoming one another with hugs and encouraging statements, while privately their aides assess each move and look for weaknesses. Give them a little cover of not having their names or the names of their candidates attached to their comments, and they’re happy to write off anything that Harris has done so far as a show for reporters and donors that will just result in focusing the opposition research on her and making her seem tired in voters’ eyes.