FOR the first time since 1992, California has an open Senate seat. In January Barbara Boxer, who at 74 is the younger of its two senators, said she would not seek re-election in 2016. That should have been the cue for an almighty dust-up among Democrats: a Senate seat is a big deal, after all. Instead it is turning into a coronation. Only a Democrat can win in the Golden State, and only one serious Democrat has entered the fray: Kamala Harris, the attorney-general.

Tom Steyer, a billionaire environmentalist, Antonio Villaraigosa, a former mayor of Los Angeles, and Gavin Newsom, the lieutenant-governor, have all stepped aside. “An entire generation of Democrats, who have been waiting for this moment for years, took one look at Kamala Harris, and quickly backed off,” says Dan Schnur, a politics professor at the University of Southern California.

Ms Harris is an intimidating opponent. The daughter of an Indian cancer researcher and a Jamaican economics professor, she is the first woman, first African-American and first Asian attorney-general of California. She has fought against crime and for gay marriage, making her popular with law-and-order and civil-rights enthusiasts. She dresses impeccably, usually in crisp grey skirt suits with a string of pearls. Barack Obama once had to apologise for calling her the “the best-looking attorney-general” in America, though it is far from clear that she was upset.

On March 25th Ms Harris found an unpopular dragon to slay. A crank has proposed asking Californian voters to approve a new law called the “Sodomite Suppression Act”, which would impose the death penalty on gay people. It has no chance of attracting enough signatures to get on the ballot, let alone passing. Still, just to be sure, Ms Harris asked a court to relieve her of her duty, as attorney-general, to write a summary of the measure to be presented to the public before it goes to the signature-gathering stage.

In 2011 Ms Harris walked out of talks with big banks accused of wrongful foreclosures during the mortgage crisis, a tactic that may have prompted them to cough up billions more to settle the case. Elizabeth Warren, a senator admired by the anti-Wall Street left, praises her fighting spirit.

Before her election to attorney-general in 2010, she spent seven years as the district attorney of San Francisco. There she started a programme for minor drug offenders called “Back on Track”; recidivism among participants was less than 10%, compared with a previous average of 54%. As attorney-general she championed the use of data and technology to track repeat offenders and figure out how to stop them from erring again.

She has also commissioned reports on little-studied areas such as school truancy, which she believes eventually lands a lot of young people in jail. She has broadened the remit of the attorney-general’s office, drawing attention to human trafficking and online privacy, and issuing guidelines about what software developers should do to protect customers’ personal data on mobile devices. More recently she has been talking to Google, Twitter and Facebook about what she calls “cyber-exploitation”—also known as “revenge porn”—the posting of sexually explicit photos without the subject’s consent. Some jilted lovers (usually men) do this to hurt the women who dumped them; some websites encourage it, or charge the victim money to get the photos taken down. Ms Harris has encouraged tech firms to scrub such photos from their servers.

Can Ms Harris make the leap from state law enforcement to national politics? One thing she has going for her, says Bruce Cain, a political-science professor at Stanford University, is that she hasn’t yet made any big mistakes. “California campaigns are heavily TV-driven, so the positive is not nearly as important as the negative,” says Mr Cain. “You win and lose based on the negative, which is why we’ve had a whole string of bland and boring governors.”

Another advantage is that by launching her campaign early, Ms Harris will have a head start in raising money. She has already held about two dozen fundraisers since announcing her Senate bid. That is a big advantage in California, which is an expensive place to run for office: sprawling, populous and with pricey media markets.

Ms Harris argues that many of the issues that she has addressed as attorney-general—such as the foreclosure crisis, recidivism, and truancy—are relevant to the country as a whole. If elected, she says she would focus on immigration, the environment, veterans’ welfare and civil rights.

She offers few bold or risky ideas. On foreign policy, for example, she says little beyond noting that Israel is a close ally. Still, what she says is sensible enough. She favours comprehensive immigration reform, curbs on greenhouse gases and a non-partisan approach to most problems. “People just want solutions,” she says.