Senator Kamala Harris says she’ll make a final decision about running for president when she’s home in Los Angeles during the holidays. She already appeared to be moving to the front of the thick Democratic pack this fall, based on her cross-examinations of Brett Kavanaugh and Jeff Sessions. The fact that she is African-American, female, and relatively youthful can only benefit her during an election cycle certain to feature powerful generational currents—particularly as a foil to Donald Trump, an old, white race-baiter. Yet if Harris runs in 2020, she will need to harness the complicated currents of identity politics, while not being defined by them.

Harris’s brand, to this point in her political career, has been grounded largely in competence and prosecutorial rigor—her central identity has been her manifest talent. She has smartly started to broaden that image by positioning herself as an advocate for the truth—in contrast to, say, Trump, a pathological liar. It is no accident that Harris’s new book, due out in January, is titled The Truths We Hold.

Harris is poised to tap into some powerful Democratic demographic truths. Black women have been the party’s most reliable voters; women of all colors came out in record numbers to support Democrats in the midterms. Harris is the daughter of an Indian immigrant mother and a Jamaican immigrant father, and South Carolina, Texas, and California, all with substantial non-white populations, hold primaries early in the 2020 season. It doesn’t hurt that Barack Obama already shattered one half of the cultural barrier when he was elected president in 2008. “That will make it easier for black Democrats, in some regards,” the Rev. Al Sharpton says. “Pre-Obama, we had to convince people that you could win as a black candidate. Now it’s: ‘Which black or white or Latino can win?’ Not: ‘Can a black win?’”

The flip side is that the racial backlash to Obama helped propel Trump to victory in 2016, and that Trump has done nothing but stoke racial polarization ever since. Some Democrats claim that nominating a person of color in 2020 would be a gift to Trump, motivating his base to turn out in the swing states that will determine who wins the electoral college. “They will make that case, because that’s what the Democratic establishment does. And that argument is dumb as dirt,” says Cornell Belcher, a pollster who worked on both of Obama’s runs. “These are the same geniuses who didn’t think that Stacey Abrams should be the nominee for governor in Georgia. The only reason that contest was competitive was because Abrams ran, and not as a middle-of-the road, conventional white candidate. And Obama’s racial breakthrough in 2008 wasn’t what most people thought it was. He got the same 43 percent of the white vote that John Kerry got and lost with in 2004. What was different was the number of black voters, and Latino voters, and young people.”

Even in defeat, Abrams, along with Andrew Gillum in Florida, both fantastically talented politicians, showed how potent the changed electorate can be. Jeremy Bird, who ran the Obama campaign’s field operation in 2012, believes trying to finesse the racial context in 2020 would be both cowardly and pointless. “It would be a real disservice to the country for Democrats to run on this false notion that we have to nominate a white candidate because Donald Trump is racist,” Bird says. “He’s still going to be racist if it’s a white nominee. You saw that in 2016.” Harris has anticipated attempts to diminish her by assigning her to narrow lanes. “I have a problem, guys, with that phrase ‘identity politics.’ Because let’s be clear: when people say that, it’s a pejorative,” she told the Netroots Nation conference in August. “I know that there are powerful voices right now that are trying to sow hate and division among us, but when it comes to issues that matter the most, I do not believe we are a divided country.”