With Sen. Kamala Harris, D-Calif., announcing her presidential bid on Monday, she has three strengths and three weaknesses in the emerging and growing 2020 race for the Democratic nomination.

Strength #1: As an African American (and Indian American), Harris has the potential to replicate the path that helped Barack Obama win the 2008 Democratic race: Win – or overperform – in Iowa, use that as a springboard to win the African-American-dominated South Carolina primary, and then run up the score in the early primaries in the South.

Strength #2: With California moving up its primary to March, Harris has the ability to rack up a significant number of delegates in her home state. The South + California strategy could be a potent combination in the race for the Democratic nomination.

Strength #3: While not Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren, Harris has solid progressive credentials – she supports Medicare For All, said in 2017 that she wasn't going to vote to keep the government open unless Congress protected the DACA recipients, and was on the front lines opposing Brett Kavanaugh's Supreme Court nomination. Bottom line: No one would mistake her as a centrist.

Weakness #1: Where progressives have taken aim, however, is Harris's record as a prosecutor in California. "Time after time, when progressives urged her to embrace criminal justice reforms as a district attorney and then the state's attorney general, Ms. Harris opposed them or stayed silent," law professor Lara Bazelon recently wrote in the New York Times.

Weakness #2: When Harris was on the statewide ballot in California in 2010, she underperformed former Gov. Jerry Brown (who won his race by 13 points) and former Sen. Barbara Boxer (10 points) by winning by less than a percentage point, 46.1 percent to 45.3 percent. But in 2016, Harris beat fellow Dem Loretta Sanchez by 20-plus points in the state's Top 2 race for Senate.

Weakness #3: As a progressive Democrat from California, Harris might *not* have the ability to have an appeal to independent and swing voters as potential 2020 Dems from other states might (Ohio's Sherrod Brown, Minnesota's Amy Klobuchar and Texas' Beto O'Rourke).