SAN FRANCISCO (KPIX 5) — It may be hard to believe for San Franciscans who think of Kamala Harris as a local politician, but her presidential campaign is going pretty well. New polling data confirms she’s one of the top candidates

Since her campaign kickoff two months ago, Senator Harris has been polling at the top of the pack of Democrats running for president. In every national poll, she’s been in third place behind Vice President Joe Biden and Senator Bernie Sanders.

Two new polls confirm Harris’s status as a leading candidate: a CNN poll and an Emerson College poll show her with 12 percent of the vote, behind Biden and Sanders and just in front of Beto O’Rourke.

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“Everyone else is basically fighting to be famous. So she’s the one non-famous candidate who has captured the imagination of a lot of democrats,” said Ryan Lizza, the chief political correspondent at Esquire, on CNN’s “The Situation Room.”

According to the poll aggregator at RealClearPolitics, since her campaign kickoff in Oakland on Jan. 27, Harris has been polling nationwide at 8 to 15 percent.

Jason McDaniel, a politics professor at San Francisco State, says Harris is doing so well despite not being very well known. This means that, unlike Biden or Sanders, she has a lot of room to grow

“People like Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders, they’re very well known already. Universally, almost, among Democratic voters, and so I think their ceiling is where they are right now,” said McDaniel.