After two years of speculation about which of them is best suited to bring the Trump era to a merciful end in 2020, Democratic politicians who have been spending their free time forming exploratory committees, soliciting donations, giving inspiring speeches, and hanging out in Iowa diners are at last announcing formal bids to become the next president of the United States. Over the next few weeks, we'll take a look at each of the front-runners: Who are they? What do they stand for? And in order to have a shot at winning the nomination they seek, what tough questions will they have to answer first? First up: California senator Kamala Harris.

1. Can she tell voters a compelling story about who she is?

Especially in a crowded field, many Democratic hopefuls have worked to make their names synonymous with a signature phrase or cause or idea—something that reminds voters who they are and what they would do if they were to become commander-in-chief. In 2008, Barack Obama was the harbinger of hope and change. Today, Elizabeth Warren is branding herself as the wonky consumer-protection guru, while Bernie Sanders wants to kick-start the economic and political revolution. Harris, who has been in Washington for all of two years, doesn’t really have hers figured out yet, mostly because she's barely had time (in D.C.-adjusted terms) to let the office paint dry. Her task, as the Los Angeles Times's Sarah D. Wire wrote last summer, is to decide what that One Big Thing is before her intraparty rivals and/or her across-the-aisle opponents do it for her.

This is not to suggest she won’t have a coherent policy agenda. On the contrary, Harris plans to run on a gigantic middle-class tax cut, federally provided rental assistance, and Sanders’s Medicare for All bill (of which she became the first Senate Democratic co-sponsor back in August). For someone who doesn't have a reputation as a strong progressive, this is a pretty dang progressive pitch.

The fear, instead, is that even a smart and charismatic and well-qualified candidate like her will be overwhelmed by the media neutron star that is Donald Trump unless they offer a bold, compelling reason for why they deserve more airtime and, after that, the office in which he sits. (Whether or not you think it fair, a common criticism of Hillary Clinton was that Democrats weren’t as enthusiastic about her as they’d hoped.) To that end, look for Harris to spend a lot of time in the coming months talking about her passion for criminal-justice reform, which she touts as a fiscally responsible method of achieving racial and economic justice.

2. Can she address lingering concerns about her career in law enforcement?

Positioning herself as the end-cash-bail candidate might invite an unwelcome brand of scrutiny, though, because her record as a prosecutor—she served as San Francisco’s district attorney from 2004 through 2010, and then as California’s attorney general through 2016—is her most important liability. In a recent, blistering New York Times op-ed, law professor Lara Bazelon walked through the lowlights of Harris’s tenures in those roles: her defense of the death penalty, her support of legislation criminalizing truancy, and her startling tendency to try and keep wrongfully convicted defendants behind bars. As attorney general, she declined to prosecute OneWest, the notorious foreclosure factory owned at the time by now Treasury secretary Steve Mnuchin, despite what the U.S. Department of Justice called evidence of “widespread misconduct” on the part of OneWest.

Harris's usual response to this sort of criticism is that as a public servant, she had an obligation to represent the state, not herself. (“I have a client, and I don’t get to choose my client,” she said about her fight to keep federal supervisors out of California prisons.) A spokesperson asserted that many of Bazelon's claims lack context, and touted several of Harris’s more forward-thinking initiatives as evidence of her bona fides.