For a couple of hours on a recent Thursday, Sen. Kamala Harris of California became the favorite to win the Democratic Party's 2020 presidential nomination.

According to the oddsmakers, that is.

PredictIt , a website that allows election junkies to place real money behind their political prognostications, has been asking thousands of its traders who they think will be the party's next White House standard-bearer . Harris, just entering her 12th month as a senator, has remained among the top three candidates since the market opened Aug. 30.

It's the 53-year-old Harris who has rocketed up the chain of fresh possibilities this year, as she's been feted by elite donors, fawned over by the Democratic establishment and elevated by a smitten national press corps.

As the cultural and ideological antidote to the current president, her ascension was almost inevitable. But it's also been in motion for years.

Ever since she stepped into the public arena, Harris has been bathed in great expectations. When he was president of NBC Universal, CNN's Jeff Zucker broke his policy of supporting candidates and introduced her to New York power players as "important for the entire country."

Former Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa predicted in August that "she's going to be knocking on doors in Iowa." In defending her against liberal critics in September, Hillary Clinton singled Harris out as one of her "favorite Democrats." Later that month, Gwainevere Catchings Hess, president of The Black Women's Agenda, introduced Harris at a luncheon as "the unsilenced, the uncensored, the unstoppable."

At a time when the Democratic Party remains adrift in the political wilderness, still painfully sorting out its last national election loss while simultaneously trying to turn the page anew, Harris has vaulted over a fleet of venerable talent to bear the torch of former President Barack Obama's legacy for the next generation.

But as the rules of the nonstop news and social media cycle dictate, with breakneck elevation comes severe scrutiny. Even as she's still finding her freshman footing, Harris has been foisted into the meat grinder, drawing early fire from liberal activists who suspiciously view her as the next anointed choice of the aristocratic party pooh-bahs who propped up Clinton.

It's a small-scale preview of what she'll face if she ultimately decides to launch a bid for the presidency halfway through her first term – a prospect she's not summarily dismissed despite laughing it off and shooing it away. "Listen, 2020 is in how many years?" she told a reporter in May. "We are in the year of our Lord 2017."

In the meantime, Harris is carefully picking her battles, quietly building a national network and noticeably increasing her political visibility with campaign stops in important battlegrounds like Florida, Ohio and Virginia – all while closely guarding against the perception she's moving too fast.

"She definitely has that 'it' quality," says Michael Kempner, a longtime Democratic fundraiser who hosted Harris at his Hamptons home in July. "Charismatic, smart, impressive – and there's that extra quality that you can't necessarily pinpoint, but it has the feeling of a star in the making. Everyone looks for the new, new thing. Kamala is the new, new thing."

"Everyone's assuming she's running for president," he adds.

The Female Obama

San Francisco District Attorney Kamala Harris poses for a portrait in 2004. (Marcio Jose Sanchez/AP)

As someone christened the next Barack Obama before Obama was even a presidential candidate, grand notions about the future have always been an ingredient in Kamala Devi Harris' profile.

"With an Indian mother and a Jamaican father, Harris strikes some observers as a California version of Barack Obama," the Los Angeles Times wrote in October 2004, during Harris' first year of elected office and a month before Obama was elected to the U.S. Senate.

Four years later, at the moment when Clinton's candidacy was in its last throes against presidential candidate Obama, The New York Times' Kate Zernike looked ahead and noted Harris as among the field of potential first female presidents.

But it was a 2009 interview on "The Late Show with David Letterman" that really injected life into the comparison. Gwen Ifill , the longtime PBS news anchor and one of the most prominent African-American journalists, who passed away in November 2016, sung Harris' praises, bestowing on her instant national notoriety.

"There's a great district attorney in San Francisco whose name is Kamala Harris. She's brilliant, she's smart, she doesn't look anything like anybody you ever see on 'Law & Order,' yet she's tough and she's got a big future," Ifill said. "They call her the female Barack Obama."

While only three years apart in age, the alignment of Harris and Obama is foremost driven by ethnic background. Both are predominantly recognized as black, yet each carries a mixed heritage that fuels a more exotic and complex storyline.

Whereas Obama is the son of a white American mother and a black Kenyan father, Harris is the daughter of an Indian mother and Jamaican father who met during graduate studies at the University of California–Berkeley.

Harris' grandfather was an Indian government diplomat and advocate for the country's independence. In traveling back to her mother's homeland as a child, she can recall walks on the beach with her grandfather filled with conversations about politics, corruption and justice.

"When we think about it, India is the oldest democracy in the world," she told India Abroad in 2009. "So that is part of my background, and without question has had a great deal of influence on what I do today and who I am."

But the parallel between Harris and Obama also speaks to Harris' political audacity – and her willingness to take bold but crucial risks at key moments in her career.

Her first campaign for San Francisco district attorney was a challenge to two-term incumbent Terence Hallinan, who previously had been her boss. Harris' first poll of the race in the spring of 2003 put her at 7 percent support to Hallinan's 30 percent.

A progressive greybeard from a family steeped in San Francisco's bloodsport politics, Hallinan, a boxer in his youth who sparred with Cassius Clay, was gruff and well-established. But that allowed Harris to run as a fresh face, free from the cobwebs that mired the halls of justice.

"The thrust of the campaign was to professionalize and make the office more effective," says Jim Stearns, Harris' general consultant on the race. "One of her favorite lines was, 'These attorneys don't even have email.'"

Harris ran on competence and change, but also from the right, arguing that Hallinan's conviction rate was one of the lowest in the state, in part due to a backlog of cases gathering dust. In one campaign mailer, she vividly relayed her charge that Hallinan endangered the city by using an image of a chalk outline from a crime scene. The mailer read: "An Outline for Disaster."

To win the race, former San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown, whom Harris dated in the '90s ("She's never suffered from that, nor have I benefited," Brown now jokes.) told the campaign it needed to raise nearly $1 million – a goal it met through a torrent of fundraisers around the country. At the same time, Harris put together an unlikely rainbow coalition of Asian-Americans, African-Americans, economically affluent moderates, and gays and lesbians.

The last weekend before the November election, her campaign tracked her as still down 5 points, but on the move to qualify for a two-person runoff. She managed to squeeze into second place after Hallinan by about 6,400 votes, and a month later, it was no contest. As the candidate situated in the ideological center, she crushed Hallinan by 13 points, becoming the state's first African-American female district attorney.

A Republican consultant in California, who did not want to be named, says an overlooked but integral factor in Harris' unlikely victory was her connection to Brown – a personal and professional relationship that dogged her during the contest . "He raised the money, got her support, put it together. She's a master at leveraging personal relationships," the consultant says.

Brown acknowledged pulling his extensive levers for Harris, but rebuffed claims he was the decisive factor.

"Oh yeah, I was mayor at the time. It was always a plus to have the mayor's office and the mayor and the mayor's friends being helpful," he says. "I was responsive to every request made by the campaign for my assistance."

The defining moment of Harris' DA tenure came almost immediately during her first year, with the murder of a young city police officer. Like most San Francisco politicians, Harris had staked out a position against capital punishment, but fell under appreciable pressure to make an exception in the case of Isaac Espinoza, who was slain by a man wielding an AK-47.

Dianne Feinstein, a Democrat and by then well into her tenure as the Golden State's senior U.S. senator, invoked the issue at the officer's funeral, with Harris seated in the front row. Later, Feinstein said if she had known Harris was against capital punishment, she probably would not have endorsed her, according to the Los Angeles Times. Even the state's more liberal Democratic senator, Barbara Boxer, called for the killer's execution.

Yet Harris stuck to her conviction that the death penalty is not a deterrent and is applied discriminately. She chose to pursue life without parole and secured consecutive life sentences for the killer, David Hill.

"What surprised people is she held her ground under huge pressure," Stearns says. "Feinstein's in the church calling for the death penalty and Kamala's in the pews. It's the kind of pressure almost all politicians seem to bend under, and she didn't bend. That elevated her stature quite a bit. Everybody knew who she was all of a sudden. And there was a lot of people who really admired her courage under fire."

As Harris was building a name for herself in San Francisco, she also found an early kinship with Obama, introducing him at a Bay Area fundraiser for his Senate campaign. He returned the favor later during her re-election bid.

Debbie Mesloh, a longtime adviser to Harris who has worked on all of her campaigns, describes Harris and Obama during their first encounter as "simpatico." "When he got elected, he said he'd only go back to Illinois. But his first out-of-state trip as senator was to San Francisco and he retired our debt," Mesloh recalls.

Later, even though Clinton was seen to have a firm lock on California ahead of its 2008 presidential primary, Harris became the first elected official in the state to endorse Obama – even as some of her top fundraisers warned against it.

Mark Buell, who has been Harris' longtime finance chairman and whose wife, Susie Tompkins Buell, is a close friend of Clinton's, says Harris called for his advice on what to do.

"I told her she had no option. She had to support him as an African-American," Buell says. "She had more to lose by not being there for him, as hard as that was for me to say. I don't think my wife appreciated what Kamala did. But I'm more pragmatic in my own mind. She did the right thing."

Harris traveled to Springfield, Illinois, for Obama's presidential campaign announcement, encouraged her staffers to move to Los Angeles to work in his statewide headquarters and became a top Obama surrogate on cable television and at public events around the country, making stops in Iowa, Nevada and New Hampshire.

As his California co-chair, she faced off with former President Bill Clinton at the state party's 2008 convention, where the pair made dueling pitches for their candidates. "Can you say 'gulp'?" Harris half-joked ahead of time . But she held her own at the party's premier statewide event.

"When you really think about it, hasn't that been, from the beginning, what this campaign to elect Barack Obama has been about?" she asked the audience, drawing a parallel between her role at the convention and Obama's presidential bid. "Hasn't it been about the audacity to do things unimaginable?"

When Obama won, Harris was in Chicago for the historic night. But while the emotion-filled moment caused her to consider joining the new administration in Washington, her team had already sketched out her next step in California, toward what they describe as her dream job.

Kamala's Comeback

Harris attends the San Francisco Pride Parade in 2013. (Jana Asenbrennerova/Reuters)

It took eight days.

That's how swiftly Harris moved to lay down her intentions to win the 2010 California attorney general race following Obama's victory. The incumbent, Democrat Jerry Brown, had been signaling for months a yearning to return to the governorship, and Harris decided she wanted to continue her prosecutorial work on a larger platform.

Politically, in what's become characteristic of her approach, she'd come to the conclusion that acting early and decisively was a smart way to get ahead of the pack. The same strategy applied to her expeditious leap into the 2016 U.S. Senate race once Boxer announced her retirement.

The attorney general contest morphed into a seven-person Democratic primary, and right off the bat Harris had to battle the perception that an African-American woman from San Francisco could not be elected the state's top cop. Even a future Democratic speaker of the California State Assembly told Harris' campaign manager, Brian Brokaw, she couldn't win.

"Every person who had been elected prior to AG was a white male," Brokaw recalls. "That was a challenge from the outset."

But Harris was shrewd in timing the release of a book, "Smart on Crime: A Career Prosecutor's Plan to Make Us Safer," for a year before the election. It landed her on the set of NBC's "Today" show for an in-person interview with Matt Lauer – an unheard-of booking for a local district attorney. She spoke about her signature cause: battling recidivism among nonviolent offenders through a program allowing low-level drug convicts to rehabilitate outside of prison. Lauer, too, cited the comparison to Obama.

Despite former Facebook executive and Democratic competitor Chris Kelly pouring some $12 million of his own money into the race, Harris ended up cruising in a cakewalk to win the June primary.

The general election pitted Harris against another district attorney: Steve Cooley, a three-time elected Republican from Los Angeles County.

Cooley essentially ran a single-issue campaign, using the death penalty as a cudgel against Harris. At a time when a Field Poll found 70 percent of Californians supported the death penalty, including 63 percent of Democrats, he ripped her as a "radical" representing "a tremendous threat to public safety." Cooley also touted endorsements from nearly every law enforcement organization in the state, and maintained a 3- to 4-point lead over Harris through the summer and into the fall.

But Cooley's confidence may have allowed a fatal slip-up during a closing October debate. Asked whether, if elected attorney general, he planned to "double dip" and collect his pension from his time as county prosecutor, Cooley replied that he did. "I earned it," he said. "Thirty-eight years of public service, I definitely earned whatever pension rights I have and I will certainly rely upon that to supplement the very low, incredibly low, salary that's paid to the state attorney general."

Harris could only laugh. "Go for it, Steve," she replied, belting out a chuckle. "You've earned it, there's no question."

But Brokaw's mind began racing.

"We're sitting there in the debate room going, 'That sounded pretty bad. Was that as bad as it sounded?'" he recalls.

It was.

The Harris campaign turned Cooley's complaint about a $150,000 salary into a potent 30-second television advertisement in the final weeks, draining its depleted coffers to place it on the air in the Los Angeles market, where Harris also savvily and tirelessly campaigned in black churches .

Around the same time, Obama struck magic again, endorsing Harris in a written statement and adding a rare last-minute fundraising stop for her down-ballot run during a jaunt to San Francisco. "It spoke to the strength of their relationship," says Sean Clegg, a top Harris strategist.

Harris also benefited from a Republican meltdown at the top of the ticket, in which gubernatorial nominee Meg Whitman found herself ensnared in a controversy over employing a housekeeper who was in the country illegally.

Election night 2010 was a cataclysm for Democrats nationwide. But in California, the party racked up a clean sweep of statewide contests – except for the attorney general race, which was too close to call. That night, Cooley held a lead and declared victory onstage by making a V sign with his fingers. But understanding absentee and provisional ballots might not be counted for days, the Harris campaign knew it still had a path. By early Wednesday morning, Harris had overtaken Cooley in the vote count.

And then she waited.

As every other Democrat on the California ticket was celebrating, Harris was holed up in an office with her advisers, monitoring sluggish vote counts and preparing legal options. With the burden of the campaign behind her, she actually loosened up and cracked jokes, seemingly at peace with her fate.

The race dragged on over the next few weeks. But on Nov. 24, with Harris in the lead by a little more than 50,000 votes, Cooley conceded. Harris ended up winning by less than a percentage point.

"She got lucky," says Kevin Spillane, a San Diego-based Republican strategist who worked for Cooley. "She got caught up in a wave. If Whitman hadn't collapsed, Cooley would've won."

Regardless, Harris had reached another series of historic milestones, becoming the first woman, first African-American and first Indian-American ever to be elected attorney general of California.

"I'm proud that we can stand here today," she said in her victory speech, "recognizing that we don't have to and one does not have to run from their convictions when they choose to run for office."

A Life's Work

As attorney general, Harris expanded anti-recidivism efforts in California. (Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)

If there's one issue that's defined Harris' 14 years in elected public service, it's been the pursuit of criminal justice reform. It's the topic she's devoted the most time to with the greatest passion, innovation and risk.

This summer, as her first major bipartisan overture in Washington, she introduced legislation with GOP Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky aimed at revamping or replacing money-based bail systems, encouraging states to use individualized risk assessments when determining whether a defendant should be released. The measure hasn't received a committee hearing.

But her commitment to the cause goes back to her years as district attorney, when she came to believe the most serious problem confronting law enforcement was the perpetual system of low-level prisoners who were finding themselves back in court within months or years of their release facing repetitive drug charges.

Her solution was to create a preventive Back on Track initiative that allowed these mostly young men to enroll in a program that offered counseling on employment, substance abuse, parenting, education and child support when they re-entered society. She billed the approach as "smart on crime," a pointed reversal from the "tough on crime" mantra that dominated the '80s and '90s and precipitated a boom in the construction of prisons.

That didn't mean Harris went soft on the most serious, violent offenders. In fact, as district attorney, she boasted of increasing felony conviction rates "to their highest level in 14 years" – words that could come back to haunt her with some progressives, given California's recent prison-crowding crisis.

As attorney general, Harris expanded her anti-recidivism efforts, launching a pilot program in Los Angeles and initiating a children's justice division aimed at supporting troubled youth at risk of slipping down a lawless path.

"There's been a real sea change in California and she's played an important part in that," says Tim Silard, president of the Rosenberg Foundation and a justice and public safety expert who has worked with Harris on many of her initiatives. "She evangelized the approach and to have this advocacy come from someone in law enforcement is incredibly rare."

Harris has called criminal justice reform her "life's work," and her approach ended up being adopted in cities including Atlanta and Philadelphia. But such a sweeping portfolio also provides a large target.

Critics say that once Harris earned a more prominent platform as attorney general to pursue the bold reforms she'd touted for years, she got cold feet. And on multiple issues at the crux of revamping the justice system, she took a blurred position or no position at all.

Earl Ofari Hutchinson, president of the Los Angeles Urban Policy Roundtable, said Harris could have been "a more vigorous advocate for full criminal justice reform." "She's been confined to [her] comfort zone and unwilling to be big and bold," he told The Sacramento Bee.

As attorney general, Harris declined to take a position on two sentencing reform ballot initiatives – one adjusting the "three strikes law" and another to reduce the penalties for certain crimes. She notably balked on a question about legalizing recreational marijuana, with a spokesman later clarifying she believed the issue should be "up to a vote of the people." (As she moved toward her election to the Senate, Harris was described as " generally supportive " of legalizing recreational marijuana, and a spokesman says she now believes states should be able to do what they want.) Following a spate of police-involved deaths of African-Americans, she stopped short of endorsing statewide mandates on the use of body cameras, saying it was up for localities to decide whether officers should wear them.

In 2014, lawyers for Harris' office argued in court against the release of eligible nonviolent prisoners so they could continue to work, a blaring contradiction to the philosophy she had championed. She pleaded ignorance. "I was shocked," she told Buzzfeed, explaining she wasn't personally involved in the high-profile case.

Harris' defenders say she made a decision early on to remain neutral on ballot initiatives given her unique role as attorney general – a position responsible for approving the title and summary language that appears for voters.

"That process, it's a very important feature in whether a proposition is successful. She's got to call balls and strikes. For her to take a position undermines her role in being fair to all sides," says Brian Nelson, a former California Department of Justice general counsel and special assistant attorney general.

Brokaw compares Harris' situation to what was expected of Obama on race relations during his tenure. "There's only so much one person can do. Just the fact that criminal justice reform is being talked about nationally ... she was one of the early people talking about smart reforms," he says.

Yet one impression left is that Harris was prioritizing her political future, rhetorically situating herself as a reformer while preserving her viability by skirting the thorniest calls.

Sen. Cory Booker, a New Jersey Democrat and potential 2020 rival who says he reveres Harris, gently checked her track record in a New York Times profile.

"I know some people might think she's not checking every box on the list for criminal ­justice reform," he said. Still, "I see her as a valued activist and ally."

After all, during this same period, Harris was aggressively moving to repair tattered relations with law enforcement, which helped make her 2014 re-election a foregone conclusion.

And then – suddenly – another opportunity came knocking.

The Shock-and-Awe Senate Race

Harris celebrates winning the 2016 California Senate race at her election night rally in Los Angeles. (Barbara Davidson/Los Angeles Times/Getty Images)

The rumors around Boxer's retirement had been swirling for months. And when the four-term senator made the announcement on the eighth day of 2015, Harris stuck with her familiar instinct to strike quick.

An open U.S. Senate seat doesn't come around often, especially in California, where it had been nearly a quarter-century since there was a race with no incumbent on the ballot. But Harris still had to decide if she wanted to pursue the federal path to Washington or hold off to run for governor in 2018.

Her core team of advisers, including Brokaw, Clegg and Ace Smith, debated the options amongst themselves, each exchanging emails and calls with Harris privately. While her consultant team was mostly aligned on entering the Senate race, some of her family members favored a bid for governor, if simply because it would keep her closer to home.

Harris took five days.

She dove in as the first major candidate in the Senate contest on the presumption that her decisiveness would deter others from challenging her. And she advocated a shock-and-awe strategy.

"The first 60 to 90 days of that were as intense a campaign as I've ever been involved with," Brokaw says. "We'd get on the 7 a.m. calls and say, 'Who are we going to roll out today?' every single day for two months. People said we were trying to create inevitability. Well, yeah. You want to jump in the race and show you're strong. One of the benefits of getting in early is you get a head start."

Other big names circled, but hemmed and hawed.

Billionaire environmental activist Tom Steyer, potentially the biggest threat to Harris due to his financial largesse, stood down early. Villaraigosa, the former Los Angeles mayor, was " very, very close " to pulling the trigger, but said his heart was in California. Rep. Xavier Becerra, the fourth-ranking House Democrat at the time, lingered for months and nudged reporters to push Harris on her positions. In July, he bailed, saying he was best positioned to make a difference in the House. Four months later, he accepted an appointment to succeed Harris as attorney general.

Harris' main opponent became Rep. Loretta Sanchez, a Latina who'd established herself as a moderate Democrat and looked to run to the right of Harris by courting independents and moderate Republicans.

Sanchez stumbled into disaster during the opening days of her campaign when, in remarks to a small group of Indian-Americans, she referenced Native Americans by bopping her hand over her mouth and mimicking a war cry.

Harris was experiencing her own problems, however, including a turbulent period with top staff. She sought out Rory Steele – a well-liked and disciplined former Marine with national Senate race experience – to manage her campaign. But fundraising quickly became a pressure point.

With her eye on becoming a nationally recognized player, Harris wanted to raise money that would place her in the stratosphere of elite Senate fundraisers like Warren, who collected more than $40 million in her 2012 run.

Yet she hemorrhaged funds almost from the start, and her penchant for preferring luxury hotels like The St. Regis and Waldorf Astoria didn't help her cash flow.

"Her travel would be a first-class seat and a fine hotel. Maggie Hassan would be at the Sheraton in New York City, and Kamala would stay at the Ritz," says a former staffer at the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, referencing the former New Hampshire governor who successfully ran for the Senate in 2016. "She's not frugal; she's fancy."

While some on her team always doubted the ambitious Warren-like finance plan, Harris signed off on a risky strategy that required a high burn rate up front for a planned payout later, according to two sources involved in the campaign.

But as stories began to surface about her spending, Harris became increasingly frustrated, lashing out at her team and denying culpability for a plan she had signed off on, these sources say.

If a single phone number was wrong on a donor list, Harris would become flustered and refuse to continue the calls. She also spurned spending time at fundraising events that would yield less than $100,000.

Steele ended up quitting, and two fundraisers departed.

Juan Rodriguez, a loyalist from Harris' attorney general office, took over as campaign chief. Harris ended up raising just over $15 million – a relatively small figure for a Democratic up-and-comer from the nation's most populous state.

"She wasn't willing to work hard enough to raise the $40 million, but was incredibly demanding to the point that nothing was ever good enough," a former staffer says.

One Harris adviser contends the DSCC's heavy-handed role in directing pricey consultant hires caused the early friction.

"The hot shots at the DSCC – they don't endorse, they don't give you money and then they tell you how to run the f------ campaign," the adviser complains.

Nonetheless, Harris was fortunate to have drawn Sanchez as her opponent. The Orange County congresswoman never recovered from her botched opening, which cannibalized her fundraising and cemented her reputation as an eccentric House member unready for the statewide stage.

Harris defeated Sanchez by 23 points on election night 2016, becoming the second African-American woman ever to serve in the U.S. Senate. It ended up being an overlooked outcome, given what was occurring at the top of the ballot.

Like most Democratic politicians that night, Harris had constructed a speech about working with the first female president. She had to tear it up. Some supporters in the room looked morose and ashen, their eyes welling up or zoning down at the floor as she addressed them.

Harris aimed for catharsis.

"Do we retreat or do we fight?" she said, attempting to lift up the room. "I say we fight. And I intend to fight."

Freshman Year

Vice President Joe Biden ducks so all of Sen. Harris' family can be seen for a group photo on Capitol Hill in 2017. (Alex Brandon/AP)

The Trump presidency has handed Harris a louder megaphone than she would've had in a Clinton administration. But she's been strategic in choosing a couple of issue areas to burrow deep into, rather than spreading herself thin.

Hailing from a state where more than 2 million immigrants live without legal status, Harris has made her opposition to Trump's immigration policies her signature cause. She attended an early protest outside the White House against the president's initial travel ban; made her first piece of legislation a bill to provide lawyers to people detained while trying to enter the U.S.; registered as one of 11 Democrats who voted against John Kelly's confirmation as homeland security secretary; and excoriated Trump's ban in her maiden Senate floor speech, saying it "may as well have been hatched in the basement headquarters of ISIS."

She recently became the first Senate Democrat to promise to oppose any end-of-the-year government funding bill unless Congress agrees to protections for so-called Dreamers, those who came into the country illegally as children and could face deportation under Trump's delayed ending of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program. The move potentially makes Harris a power player in this month's fiscal negotiations.

"She felt like there was a vacuum, even in the Democratic caucus, in putting immigrant reform and the rights of immigrants first above other issues," Clegg says.

While it's no secret Harris pined for a slot on the Judiciary Committee, she's made the most of her prosecutorial pedigree on the Senate intelligence panel overseeing an investigation into Russian election interference and potential campaign collusion.

In March, she called on Attorney General Jeff Sessions to resign due to his failure to disclose his contacts with the Russian ambassador to the U.S. during the presidential campaign. But it was her pugnacious questioning of Sessions and Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein at a pair of June hearings that produced her most memorable moments. In both instances, Republican senators moved to interrupt her queries, with Sessions complaining her pacing "makes me nervous."

"I wish I could question witnesses the way she does," Sen. Mark Warner, a Virginia Democrat and the intelligence committee's vice chairman, has told colleagues, according to a Democratic committee staffer.

Harris' expertise also been valuable behind the scenes, as she pumped the brakes at the beginning of the year when liberals were calling on committee members to proceed with the Russia probe at a faster clip by bringing in more outside witnesses. "She'd say, 'You need to get the documents first, you need to work your way up the chain,'" says the Democratic staffer, who's familiar with the committee's closed-door debates.

Politically, Harris has been an active supporter of her Democratic colleagues, doling out contributions from her political action committee, Fearless for the People, to the two independents and every Senate Democrat on the ballot in 2018, except for Maria Cantwell of Washington, who doesn't accept PAC money. Powered by a robust digital advertising presence her advisers kept in place after her campaign, she's raised more than $1 million for her colleagues and the DSCC this year, and is expected to dive into a handful of House races next year, especially as Democratic chances for a takeover of the chamber escalate.

A perusal of contributions to Harris' PAC show her unsurprising appeal in Hollywood, as she's netted donations from Jeffrey Katzenberg, Steven Spielberg, Kate Capshaw and R&B singer Usher. But she's also earned support from former Rep. Bart Stupak, a moderate Democrat from rural Michigan known for his opposition to abortion.

Stupak says he's impressed by Harris' ability to stand firm in her beliefs while also being welcoming to a range of beliefs, a nod to her opposition to holding any ideological purity tests for Democrats.

"If I didn't know she was from California, I'd think she was from Missouri or North Dakota," Stupak says. "I'm pro-life, but I don't feel uncomfortable around her. She's accepting of others and she's trying to be inclusive in our party, and I think she's what our party needs."

Harris' team, acutely aware of how every move she makes will be viewed through the lens of a presidential campaign, declined several requests by U.S. News for an interview. But the senator is slowly stepping out onto the electoral tarmac: She's dropped into Ohio, hosting five fundraisers for Sen. Sherrod Brown; campaigned inside black churches in Virginia for Gov.-elect Ralph Northam; and done a three-city tour with Sen. Bill Nelson of Florida. Along with Clinton, she headlined this fall's Human Rights Campaign National Dinner, and the New Hampshire Democratic Party already has a request in for her to visit in 2018.

One Democratic Senate strategist describes Harris as the hottest draw on the campaign circuit right now, falling in the same class as Sanders, who is far more selective in whom he assists.

The 2020 Question

Harris is surrounded by reporters on Capitol Hill. (Tom Williams/CQ Roll Call/Getty Images)

There are private moments, before she is set to address a large crowd or deliver a marquee speech, when Harris refers to "scouts in the audience" – a clear indication to staff that her future constantly weighs on her mind.

Yet like many politicians, Harris is somewhat superstitious, famously keeping a close guard against formal discussions about what's next for her.

"It was understood to be taboo to talk about that with her or around her," Brokaw says.

In the coming year, though, her clever maneuvering around the chatter surrounding a potential 2020 presidential candidacy will be beside the point. The talk will commence and increase organically as the midterm elections creep closer and party activists, along with the media horde, begin to search for the top crop of leaders in a large pack of ambitious Democrats.

Harris almost inevitably will be one of them and is arguably already a pre-eminent player – which is why the knives are out.

Over the summer, Harris found herself in the cross-hairs of liberal activists aligned with Sanders, some of whom view her as too cozy with corporate donors and establishment politics.

RoseAnn DeMoro, executive director of the labor union National Nurses United, decried Harris' progressive credentials to The New York Times and swiped dismissively that "she's not on our radar." Nomiki Konst, another Sanders supporter, raised Harris' alleged ties to Wall Street following news of her visiting the Hamptons to hobnob with Clinton allies.

Some of the distrust stems from Harris' refusal to take action as attorney general against Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin's former company, OneWest Bank, for possible illegal foreclosure practices. Harris' advisers say she believed there was insufficient evidence to support a conviction and faced legal limitations on the information her office could compel OneWest to provide. Meanwhile, Mnuchin's only donation to a Democratic Senate candidate during the 2016 campaign cycle was a $2,000 gift to Harris, though she voted against his confirmation as treasury chief after winning her seat.

It's all been enough for Mic to declare Harris has a "Bernieland" problem and for digital publication Paste to assert there are "135,613 Reasons Kamala Harris Will Not Be President in 2020" – a reference to money she reportedly received from the lobbying sector in the 2016 election cycle, though data from MapLight and the Center for Responsive Politics leads to a slightly different total.

Harris' allies think the critiques are unfair.

"I find it very frustrating," says Karen Finney, a former Clinton campaign hand who has contributed to Harris' PAC. "The Bernie crowd seems to be purist when it comes to everyone except Sen. Sanders. He is a politician, too. He has good votes and bad votes."

"It's early in her career in the national spotlight; rather than tearing people down because they seem to be getting some attention, let's see what they do," Finney says.

Grouses a Harris Senate aide: "The 2016 primary isn't over for" Sanders supporters.

Clegg finds the charge that Harris is in bed with the banks the most ludicrous, referencing the $25 billion multistate mortgage settlement she helped hatch in 2012 for homeowners ravaged by wrongful foreclosures. The Obama administration had backed a multistate settlement effort, but Harris found the initial $4 billion her state was slated to receive from the banks to be a pittance. She exited the talks, playing hardball and building a case that ended up netting some $18 billion in California-specific relief from banks including Wells Fargo and JPMorgan Chase.

"That wrap on her is just fundamentally false. There's nobody in the U.S. Senate who's got a record equal to Kamala Harris [in] taking on big banks and actually delivering something for people," Clegg says, making a veiled reference to Sanders and Warren. "But folks with a view of how they want future races to shape up are going to do their thing."

Harris' decision to become the first senator to co-sponsor Sanders' Medicare-for-all legislation was seen as an olive branch to the restless left and the strongest proof she was more in line with them than they realized.

But for DeMoro, a fervent Sanders ally, it's still not enough. "We would have have hoped she would have supported the single-payer bill in her home state," she says. "Democrats control the state so it can happen there."

Clegg says Harris didn't take a position on single-payer legislation that's been the subject of debate in California because "she's not a member of the state legislature" – an answer that will only feed the perception she's selectively ducked difficult questions.

Ironically, Harris' most hazardous vulnerability as a national candidate might be that she's too similar to Obama in tenor: dramatically progressive rhetorically, but much more measured and pragmatic when the rubber hits the road.

Yet it's also fair to assume the gripes with Harris are a reflexive reaction to someone Sanders' loyalists see as a gathering threat to his predominant influence on the Democratic Party.

So is Harris closer to Hillary, or is she a Berniecrat? It's part of her essence that she leaves it unclear, dangling a foot in both camps.

"It's somewhere in between. It really is. She's a pragmatist but with real conviction about her politics. Where does that put her?" Buell says.

It might put her in the sweet spot.

"I see her as someone who has her own way, who could bridge those wings potentially," says Brooks Cutter, a Sacramento attorney and longtime Harris supporter.

And yet, behind the scenes, there's a stormy side to Harris that former aides say rears its head when pressure is mushrooming. Conversations with four people who have previously worked with Harris portray her as simultaneously brilliant and obsessively thorough, but also as exceedingly high-maintenance and prone to hostile outbursts. She once, for example, was witnessed berating an aide inside a Washington elevator after a car dropped her off at the wrong location for a breakfast with labor leaders.

Such traits are not uncommon among politicians who are tasked with rigorous schedules and high-stakes public appearances and private meetings, though any exacerbating stressors would be magnified tenfold amid the boiling turmoil of a presidential campaign.

"People always felt on eggshells with her" during her Senate race, one former staffer says. "She's tenacious and persistent, but can be quite fragile. The stress manifests itself in some really ugly ways."

Another staffer from Harris' years as attorney general says she was "a little terrified" before events knowing that Harris, as a meticulous prosecutor, would pick apart the weakest portions of a case the staffer had worked on and Harris was about to present publicly. Yet the attorney general could exude spurts of great warmth as well, sending the same staffer a bouquet of flowers and handwritten note when her son was born.

Harris also has her quirks. During her Senate bid, she required metal silverware for meals, once compelling a staffer to take a set from a donor's house. She often required a personal assistant to provide two or three lunch options in order to accommodate her finicky diet and preference for vegan dishes. These eccentricities did not ultimately damage her last campaign, but leaks of such behavior could impair the morale of future staff and create a pernicious national media narrative.

Harris aides privately confide that their boss will confront the mammoth 2020 question in about a year, when the dust has settled on the 2018 landscape. She will need to weigh whether it's too soon, an argument Obama also confronted as he navigated the blossoming interest around his own aspirations. And she'll face the question of whether a biracial woman from uber-liberal San Francisco would be the best option to chip away at Trump's Rust Belt coalition.

Baltimore political strategist Catalina Byrd, an African-American herself, told The Philadelphia Tribune earlier this year she didn't think Democrats would allow a black woman to head their ticket. And Buell, with no intention of slighting Harris, says he doesn't think "2020 would be the right time."

"I think she needs more experience under her belt," he says. "I just think the world of her. She's got enormous talent. When I say 2020 is too early, I want to see her be her best and not be prematurely launched when people are desperately looking for leadership."

But some members of Harris' team are already sketching out a case in their own heads, even if they've been reluctant to broach it with her. "She'd wring my neck if I came into a meeting talking about 2020," one says.

In two separate conversations with a pair of advisers who have worked for Harris at different points in her career, the outlines of a successful presidential primary race were strikingly similar.

It would go something like this:

Iowa and New Hampshire are overwhelmingly white but increasingly progressive, and Lily Adams – Harris' communications director and the daughter of Cecile Richards, the president of Planned Parenthood – was Clinton's spokeswoman in the Hawkeye State, providing Harris with at least a toehold. Those first two states are perhaps the toughest of the lot but are winnable in a fractured field, particularly following Obama's successes there.

The South Carolina primary vote in 2016 was more than 60 percent African-American, boding well for a dynamic minority candidate.

Harris' natural relations with Latino union groups in California would give her an early leg up in neighboring Nevada. ("The dirty little secret about the Nevada caucuses is they are fueled by California labor," one adviser says.)

A fleet of Southern states like Georgia and Alabama are home to large African-American populations, which will dominate the primary vote.

Oh, and did we mention delegate king California moved its primary up to March, becoming the anchor of Super Tuesday?



"There's a real theory of the case, based on her intangibles of charisma and the mood, as well as structural advantages that are appealing to her," says the adviser, before cutting himself off.

Brown, who says he keeps in occasional contact with Harris, crowns her and her family a new version of the Kennedys. Her sister, Maya Harris, is also an attorney who was a vice president of the Ford Foundation and an adviser to Clinton's 2016 campaign. Her brother-in-law, Tony West, was No. 3 in the Obama administration's Justice Department before becoming general counsel for PepsiCo, and was recently hired to be the chief legal officer at Uber.

"I think she has a golden opportunity to be a candidate for president, whether or not it's 2020 or sometime thereafter," Brown says.

Even if Harris declines a presidential bid in what's expected to be one of the most expansive Democratic fields of the modern era, she'll likely end up on almost anyone's short list for a running mate.

"She'd be a dream VP for anybody who is running. Whether you're Bernie or Joe Biden or Jason Kander," says a Democratic consultant who has worked with Harris.

In the near term, Harris' biggest hurdle may be matching the somewhat unfair expectations that have been set for her so early. "There's a boom-and-bust cycle to all these," says a California Democratic consultant unaffiliated with Harris. "By definition, you can't be the flavor of the month for more than a month."

In a May commencement speech at Howard University, her undergraduate alma mater, Harris urged students to get off the sidelines and into the arena, laying out options like marching for Black Lives Matter or becoming a prosecutor. The message was that rather than be spectators to decisions, they should be involved in their crafting, no matter what preconceived notions are pitted against them.

"So do not be constrained by tradition. Do not listen when they say it can't be done. And do not be burdened by what has been when you can create what should be. Like James Baldwin said, 'The time is always now.' So no false choices," she said, quoting the famed African-American writer.

That advice may come in handy for herself a year from now.

She may not know what she'll do yet.