Kamala Harris spent election night at home in Los Angeles. She had certainly earned a quiet evening with her husband. During the midterms, Harris traveled to 15 states—with repeat visits to Ohio, Georgia, Nevada, and Florida—campaigning on behalf of more than two dozen Democratic candidates, capping it with a four-day bus tour through California. She also raised or donated more than $9 million to the party’s cause. All while maintaining a packed schedule in her day job, as California’s junior senator.

And Harris is going to need that precious rest. Because even as the hundreds of hard-fought contests playing out all over the country during the past year of midterms madness rightly consumed the political world’s attention—and the proximate results it has now produced, including restoring a Democratic majority in the House, are hugely important—a second crucial contest has been unfolding in the background. A dozen likely Democratic 2020 presidential contenders were trying to better position themselves at the same time they were trying to elect fellow Democrats. Harris appears to be the winner of this very early round.

Harris sits on the Senate Judiciary Committee, and the Brett Kavanaugh Supreme Court confirmation hearings gave her a nationally televised platform to raise her profile. Harris seized the opportunity with forceful questioning shaped by her background as a prosecutor. One demonstration of the impact: in the week after the final Kavanaugh hearing, a Harris e-mail solicitation raised $450,000 to back Senator Heidi Heitkamp, who was running a tough (and ultimately unsuccessful) re-election race in North Dakota yet still made the politically unpopular decision to vote against Kavanaugh. Less quantifiable, but just as real, was the star power Harris demonstrated on the trail. Her appearance at a rally for Jacky Rosen, who went on to unseat an incumbent Republican senator in Nevada, generated a crowd reaction second only to that of ex-president Barack Obama. “Senator Harris has made her mark in the Senate in a very short time, which isn’t easy to do,” says Stephanie Cutter, a Democratic strategist who was Obama’s deputy campaign manager in 2012. “She’s a real contender, not just because she’s an African-American woman, but because she’s inspiring and has a cut-through-the-bullshit-and-get-things-done quality. However, there’s a pool of senators running, and they all have to think about how to distinguish themselves in a very crowded race.”

Indeed. And Harris was by no means the only likely entrant who helped him or herself during the 2018 midterms. Former vice president Joe Biden was the surrogate most in demand, and probably made the most campaign appearances and raised the most money. That’s a testament to Biden’s wide-ranging demographic reach. Progressive audiences love his years with Obama; working-class, ethnic crowds respond to his Joe-from-Scranton side. In New York, for instance, Biden’s favorables are higher than any other Democrat, including Andrew Cuomo, who on Tuesday won a third term as governor in a landslide. Yet the past few months and the #MeToo movement also revived attention to one of Biden’s unflattering episodes: the humiliating questions he asked of Anita Hill in 1991. And with the national party trending younger, more female, and less white, it’s hard to see Biden’s popularity translating in presidential primaries. “The electorate overall is more female and diverse than it has ever been before,” Cutter says. “And especially for Democrats, women, people of color, and young people are doing the heavy lifting. The big question on the table is what does that mean for 2020? I honestly don’t think we know yet.”