Kamala Harris spent election night at home in Los Angeles. She had certainly earned a quiet evening with her husband. During the midterms, Harris traveled to 15 states—with repeat visits to Ohio, Georgia, Nevada, and Florida—campaigning on behalf of more than two dozen Democratic candidates, capping it with a four-day bus tour through California. She also raised or donated more than $9 million to the party’s cause. All while maintaining a packed schedule in her day job, as California’s junior senator.

And Harris is going to need that precious rest. Because even as the hundreds of hard-fought contests playing out all over the country during the past year of midterms madness rightly consumed the political world’s attention—and the proximate results it has now produced, including restoring a Democratic majority in the House, are hugely important—a second crucial contest has been unfolding in the background. A dozen likely Democratic 2020 presidential contenders were trying to better position themselves at the same time they were trying to elect fellow Democrats. Harris appears to be the winner of this very early round.

Harris sits on the Senate Judiciary Committee, and the Brett Kavanaugh Supreme Court confirmation hearings gave her a nationally televised platform to raise her profile. Harris seized the opportunity with forceful questioning shaped by her background as a prosecutor. One demonstration of the impact: in the week after the final Kavanaugh hearing, a Harris e-mail solicitation raised $450,000 to back Senator Heidi Heitkamp, who was running a tough (and ultimately unsuccessful) re-election race in North Dakota yet still made the politically unpopular decision to vote against Kavanaugh. Less quantifiable, but just as real, was the star power Harris demonstrated on the trail. Her appearance at a rally for Jacky Rosen, who went on to unseat an incumbent Republican senator in Nevada, generated a crowd reaction second only to that of ex-President Barack Obama. “Senator Harris has made her mark in the Senate in a very short time, which isn’t easy to do,” says Stephanie Cutter, a Democratic strategist who was Obama’s deputy campaign manager in 2012. “She’s a real contender, not just because she’s an African-American woman, but because she’s inspiring and has a cut-through-the-bullshit-and-get-things-done quality. However, there’s a pool of senators running, and they all have to think about how to distinguish themselves in a very crowded race.”

Indeed. And Harris was by no means the only likely entrant who helped him or herself during the 2018 midterms. Former Vice President Joe Biden was the surrogate most in demand, and probably made the most campaign appearances and raised the most money. That’s a testament to Biden’s wide-ranging demographic reach. Progressive audiences love his years with Obama; working class, ethnic crowds respond to his Joe-from-Scranton side. In New York, for instance, Biden’s favorables are higher than any other Democrat, including Andrew Cuomo, who on Tuesday won a third term as governor in a landslide. Yet the past few months and the #MeToo movement also revived attention to one of Biden’s unflattering episodes: the humiliating questions he asked of Anita Hill in 1991. And with the national party trending younger, more female, and less white, it’s hard to see Biden’s popularity translating in presidential primaries. “The electorate overall is more female and diverse than it has ever been before,” Cutter says. “And especially for Democrats, women, people of color, and young people are doing the heavy lifting. The big question on the table is what does that mean for 2020? I honestly don’t think we know yet.”

Elizabeth Warren fits better with the party’s left wing, and she is, after Biden, the Dem’s second biggest name, nationally. The Massachusetts senator made a dubious choice during the recent midterms: answering President Donald Trump’s taunts by airing the results of a DNA test validating Warren’s claims of Native American ancestry. That move drew headlines—many of them unflattering, with the head of the Cherokee nation dismissing Warren’s attempt to document her bond. But a different, quieter racial outreach by Warren was savvier and possibly more significant. In August she spoke to her fellow lefties at the Netroots convention in New Orleans—then stayed an extra day after the convention ended, doing an event with Louisiana Congressman Cedric Richmond where she talked about the structural racism of the criminal justice system. Warren seems to have learned from Bernie Sanders’s failures in 2016, when the Vermont senator was beaten soundly in Democratic primary states that have significant nonwhite populations. Sanders—still not an actual Democrat—also drew big crowds when he spoke during the midterms, but the candidates he endorsed didn’t fare terribly well.

The opposite is true for another unorthodox politician. In terms of 2020 relevance, the possible presidential contender who gained the most ground during the midterms was Mike Bloomberg. Six months ago Bloomberg was just one more center-left rich guy who would be writing some checks to support like-minded candidates. This morning, Bloomberg can claim to be a kingmaker. His $80 million—deployed with strategic acumen by Howard Wolfson—backed 17 out of 19 winners, in races where the results are final; he’s likely to pick up three or four more victories in the five races that are still too close to call. It’s not just Bloomberg’s daunting midterms batting average—it’s that the wins came mostly in contests that were within the margin of error when Bloomberg got involved, and that they mostly came in the kind of suburban districts than Democrats will need in 2020. In some—particularly Kendra Horn’s upset House win in Oklahoma—Bloomberg’s money was likely decisive. The former New York City mayor remains out-of-step with the national Democratic Party in many ways: he’s a 76-year-old white, male billionaire whose record includes staunch backing for the N.Y.P.D. stopping-and-frisking thousands of innocent male blacks, for instance. But Bloomberg—who spent yesterday in Singapore—is more personally interested in running for president than he was during two previous flirtations. Yesterday’s results, coupled with his bank account, would make him a legitimate factor.

Two other Democrats emerge from the midterms having seriously strengthened their hands for 2020—one by winning a Senate race, the other by losing. Beto O’Rourke could not overcome Ted Cruz in Texas. But he became a national star in the process, a charismatic speaker of unabashed progressive views who can now call on a vast national fund-raising network. O’Rourke’s 2020 chances are actually better for having lost: if he’d beaten Cruz, he would have had to effectively ditch his new job in his rookie Senate year in order to run for the White House. One top national Democratic strategist highlights the increasing importance of a digital campaign operation for 2020, and says Harris, New Jersey Senator Cory Booker, and New York Senator Kirsten Gillibrand have been aggressive and focused on expanding their online lists of supporter and donors. “And clearly Beto built that network,” the strategist says. “His chances of winning in 2020 would be low, but so will everyone else’s. He will never have more momentum than he has now. If Beto wants to be president, he should run now.” Says a second national Democratic consultant, “Beto should go to Iowa next week. He would draw 10,000 people, and the other candidates would shit their pants.”

Ohio Senator Sherrod Brown’s midterm campaign drew a whole lot less attention than O’Rourke’s. But Brown, who won re-election yesterday, can point to a long and deep progressive record—and to the fact that he is the rare Democrat who was able to win a statewide, swing state, key electoral college state race despite Trump weighing in on behalf of his opponent. Brown will return to his Capitol Hill office to begin a third term in January, but his victory-night speech sure sounded like the opening notes of a 2020 bid. “This is our America: we will never give up the hallowed ground of patriotism to the extremists,” Brown told a cheering crowd in Cleveland. “I repeat. We will never ever give up the hallowed ground of patriotism to the extremists—at the statehouse and in the White House.”

Add in former Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick, Minnesota Senator Amy Klobuchar, maybe Massachusetts Congressman Seth Moulton, and even (heaven help us) Michael Avenatti, and Brown would have plenty of Democratic company in Iowa. “To me, the more instructive 2020 lesson from the midterms is not how you might size up any individual aspirants and the amount of events they’ve done,” says Brian Fallon, who was the spokesman for Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign and is now the executive director of Demand Justice. “More telling is, who was actually on the ballot and captured the popular imagination, win or lose? [Andrew] Gillum in Florida. [Stacey] Abrams in Georgia. And Beto in Texas. That’s a clear tier of people who lit the progressive grassroots on fire. It’s where the money and the enthusiasm has flowed. It tells me the argument that Democrats need to nominate a custodial figure who is going to be inoffensive to a wide swath of the electorate, because we need to play for the general election, win over independents, and be inoffensive to Republicans and get some crossover votes—I don’t think that’s going to carry the day in 2020.” The midterms are done. The battle for how best to take on Trump is well underway.

This post has been updated.

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