Kamala Harris is up against a whole lot. As the presumptive Democratic nominee, she’s fighting years of political malaise among her own voters while competing against a man who has a cult-like following within his base. But these challenges, as Hillary Clinton learned herself in 2016, hardly get at the biggest question mark: Is America finally ready for a woman in the White House? That’s the subject of this week’s episode of Inside the Hive, which features NBC News Capitol Hill correspondent Ali Vitali, who unpacks the long-standing gender inequities of performing on the national stage, the unique challenges faced by the vice president, and what a Harris victory might mean in the decades to come. “The more Black people, the more women who you see in positions of power, the more you realize, Hey, this is normal. Of course when they run they can win,” Vitali says. “And that’s partly why we’re seeing this coalescing around Kamala Harris right now.”

As a female former prosecutor, Harris can deploy many different lines of attack against Donald Trump, a convicted felon. But few issues open up a stronger arsenal to the vice president than abortion, which she has spent years defending, including during her time as California’s attorney general and a US senator. “She’s the better messenger on this [than Joe Biden]. It’s always been viewed that way,” Vitali says of Harris. “Reproductive health care, abortion access, Black maternal mortality; this is squarely in her portfolio. It’s really a confluence of a résumé meeting a political moment.”

At the same time, the correspondent notes, female hopefuls and candidates of color can run the risk of getting “pigeonholed” into an issue, especially if it dovetails with their own minority status. “We allow white male candidates a level of objectivity on everything that we don’t necessarily afford to non-white, non-male candidates,” she explains. “If [non-white, non-male candidates] make, for example, immigration a key issue and they’re a Hispanic candidate, as Julián Castro did in 2019; if they make items of the care economy a key issue, as Elizabeth Warren and Kamala Harris have…that’s a trap that Harris is going to have to avoid because to be president, you have to be president for everyone. And so that’s gonna be a toggling game that’s gonna have to be played.”