Kamala Harris has broken barriers throughout her career, and in winning this election with Biden, I think she can overcome another obstacle. Whether it is in 2024 or 2028, I see a path for a female president. Harris has proven that she has what it takes, showing that she can not only secure California, but also the vice presidency.

Of course, this victory is not solely hers—this is a collective effort from a huge variety of groups mobilizing across the states—but seeing her as vice president-elect gives me butterflies in my stomach that I haven’t had in years. If her performance in the vice presidential debate against Mike Pence is anything to go by, we can expect her to be a fierce opponent to a future Republican challenger.

When Harris announced her candidacy for the US Senate at the beginning of 2015, she received broad support from the Democratic party. Then-President Barack Obama and then-Vice President Biden endorsed her campaign. In January 2017, she became the first Indian woman and the second Black woman to enter the US Senate. 

Back in 2019, Perry Bacon Jr. once noted that if Biden won in November, his VP pick could go on to become the first woman president. 

It is hard to believe Biden is the best candidate the Democrats could find, and harder still to believe that he will be an 82-year-old president in 2024. Biden knows as much, and he has already revealed that he will not run again, an unprecedented admission in a candidate. 

The precedent exists for the vice president to take over on health grounds. This constitutional mechanism, judging from Pelosi’s recent maneuvers, is much on the minds of Harris’s fellow California Democrats. They said that if Joe Biden becomes the first Democratic president to undergo deposition by the 25th Amendment—and I think it’s a matter of “when,” not “if”— then Kamala Harris will be America’s first female president.

WFMY News 2 journalist Tanya Rivera provided her thoughts on the matter.

“It’s very possible for the world… to come upon a new life-changing strategy for what was happening during the last several weeks,” Rivera said.

Vice President-elect Kamala Harris could definitely make it as the 47th or 48th president of the US. If Harris becomes the nation’s first female president, her presidency will serve as a message for women in future generations as they continue to make history.

It is also possible that in the next four years, the Democratic party will have moved further to the left, and that Biden and Harris’s more moderate politics will have fallen out of fashion, encouraging a primary challenge.