One Harris answer started with musings on the attempted coup and ended with a plug for the child tax credit. She’s plainly wary of saying anything that might deviate from President Joe Biden’s message that Democrats and Republicans need to reach across the aisle.

But she also has reason to address this dangerous moment in a more direct way, given that she is positioned to represent the future of the Democratic Party. As the oldest president ever to serve, Biden is not guaranteed to seek reelection in 2024, making Harris the heir apparent. Yet many Democrats openly doubt Harris’s ability to defeat either Trump (should he run again) or one of the many Republicans remaking themselves in his image. “I hate to even say it, but it will be very difficult for her, for the obvious reasons, and it shouldn’t be that way,” says Dennis DeConcini, a moderate Democratic former senator from Arizona, one of the states that Biden narrowly flipped in 2020.

Polls show Biden is significantly more popular than Harris, and his team is running more smoothly than hers. If she doesn’t close that gap, and soon, she risks inviting Democratic challengers into the field of a future presidential primary. And even if she prevails in such a fight, unless she can win over more voters to her side, she will struggle to win the presidency—just as she struggled to win the nomination when she tried for it herself.

Biden defined his campaign as a battle for the soul of America, a fight to defend democracy that the nation could not afford to lose. He won the first round of that fight. But if Harris is to face a resurgent Trumpism, can she find a way to win the second?