Earlier this week Kamala Harris entered the 2020 presidential race. Her announcement was the expected conclusion to the will-she-won’t-she conversation that has surrounded her since she was elected to the Senate in 2016, announced her well-timed memoir in 2018, and raised millions to support progressive candidates in the midterm elections in November. As was true for Elizabeth Warren and Kirsten Gillibrand, who also formalized their candidacies in recent weeks, the fact that Harris has decided to join this raucous, crowded campaign season had started to feel inevitable. Of course she would run.

Kamala Harris is qualified, popular, and charismatic. Sure she has her flaws, but she polls well. Her sharp critiques of the Trump administration have raised her national profile. Even her facial expressions have gone viral.

Warren had a similar reception. When she announced in late December, news outlets blared that she’d done what we all knew she would and made it “official.” The noted wonk was a committed populist before some Bernie Bros were born. She’s an ardent progressive, a vanquisher of corporate influence! Of course she would run.

Gillibrand, too: She launched her own initiative to inspire women to run for office in 2012 called “Off the Sidelines.” She’s been a vocal advocate for survivors of sexual assault and pushed lawmakers to pass bills on the issue months before the Me Too movement exploded. It was a no-brainer. If not her, then who? Of course, of course, of course she would run.

With Warren, Gillibrand, and now Harris in the contest, the top three frontrunner candidates in the Democratic race for president are women. Count Tulsi Gabbard, and just under 50 percent of all the candidates who’ve jumped in so far are female. (As for their male counterparts—who can even name them?) Read this sentence twice. Read it six times. Shout it from an open window. The women are in.

For more than two centuries, men have occupied the Oval Office. In that time we’ve seen one woman sit atop either of the two main parties’ tickets and just a handful of women run for president at all. Harris nodded at one example when she made her announcement 47 years to the week after Shirley Chisholm became the first black woman ever to seek the position.

After Hillary Clinton’s loss and the historic midterms, the presidential race, too, should feel like a revolution. Instead what’s remarkable is how the 2020 battle feels so obvious. Routine. Sublime, spectacular, triumphant—but also, normal. When I saw that Harris had announced, as predicted, on live television I didn’t drop a coffee mug or break a plate or scream. I smiled for a second and then went back to breakfast. It was just another 8:00 A.M. in America, with just one more ambitious woman in contention for the White House. As we were! This is our life now.

What’s remarkable is how the 2020 battle feels so obvious. Routine. Sublime, spectacular, triumphant—but also, normal.

“This field of wildly qualified, incredibly impressive women is making the most consequential political race of our lifetime look and feel more like the reality we all aspire to—basic equality—and that is such a positive thing for the American public to be witnessing,” writes Ilyse Hogue, president of NARAL Pro-Choice America, in an email to Glamour. Despite eons of entrenched sexism, four women have decided to throw their hats into what will be a wild, intense race. At least one other woman seems poised to join them. For those of us who refused to take part in the class POTUS unit in third grade because no woman had ever served, the future looks bright.

It was just a few months ago that pundits wanted to know whether the millions of women who’d marched in 2017 would vote, let alone win. It was two dozen or so months before that some worried Clinton’s defeat in 2016 would put a generation of women off elected office. It turns out women do vote and women can win. Who else but us delivered the most diverse class of lawmakers ever to take their seats in the House of Representatives, with 102 women elected to the chamber (and three dozen brand new members)? More than 20 were first-time women candidates, a record.

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