“On the issue of climate change: Every parent wants to know that their child can drink clean water and breathe clean air. And that same parent wants to know that they’re able to bring home enough money with one job to pay their bills and pay their rent and put food on the table, instead of having to work two or three jobs,” she said. “Every person wants to know that there will be a criminal-justice system that is fair to all people, regardless of their race. Every person wants that a mother and father should not have to sit down with their teenage son and have the talk, and tell that child about how they will be stopped or arrested, or profiled and potentially shot because of their race.”

Read: Kamala Harris’s anti-Trump tour

She wouldn’t say that the other candidates are doing it wrong—at least, not directly. “Nobody is living their life through the lens of one issue,” Harris said. “Let’s not put people in a box, and as they make their decisions, let’s give them credit for being smarter than that.”

Martin Luther King Jr. Day gave the country its first real taste of what the 2020 presidential campaign is going to be like. Harris kicked off the action by launching her campaign with an early-morning appearance on Good Morning America from New York. Mike Bloomberg and Joe Biden sat next to each other at a table on the first floor of the Mayflower Hotel at Al Sharpton’s breakfast in Washington, each taking different tacks in addressing records littered with potential problems in appealing to African American voters, if they decide to run. Cory Booker and Bernie Sanders were in South Carolina, at a church where King was supposed to appear before changing plans and heading to a sanitation workers’ strike in Memphis, Tennessee, where he was assassinated. Kirsten Gillibrand appeared at another Sharpton event in New York. And Warren, Julián Castro, and Sherrod Brown all appeared at smaller Martin Luther King Jr. events in their hometowns.

Bloomberg captured the must-beat-Trump mood that is defining the party, looking at the other potential candidate in the room whose decision would likely do the most to shape the dynamics of the race.

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

“Whatever the next year brings for Joe and me, I know we’ll both keep our eyes on the real prize, which is a Democrat winning the White House in 2020 and getting our country back on track,” he said.

Harris and her staff knew for weeks that she was going to announce over Martin Luther King Jr. weekend, and they built a crescendo around that. Her book tour at the beginning of the month served as a buffer to introduce her to more and more people. While the chattering classes have already anointed her a juggernaut, many ordinary Americans have never heard of her. And the book tour had the added benefit of allowing her to weather initial attacks on her record as San Francisco district attorney and California attorney general before she was technically even a candidate.