Kamala Harris is used to being the first.
Born in 1964 in Oakland, California to immigrant parents - an Indian mother and Jamaican father - she was named Kamala, which means "lotus flower" in Sanskrit.
Kamala Devi Harris studied law and rose to become the first woman of colour to be elected Attorney General of California.
Five years later, she was the first Indian American to be elected to the United States Senate.
She made a name for herself grilling political opponents facing Senate hearings.
Ms Harris famously asked Brett Kavanaugh, Donald Trump's Supreme Court nominee at the time: "Can you think of any laws that give the government the power to make decisions about the male body?"
"I'm not aware… I'm not thinking of any right now, Senator," Kavanaugh tentatively replied, after Harris repeated the question.
And in 2021 she became the first woman, the first woman of colour and the first woman of Indian descent to be sworn in as US Vice President.
Now as Joe Biden has quit the US presidential race and endorsed Harris as the Democratic Party's new nominee, could she smash another record as the first female President of the United States?
Ms Harris first ran for President in 2019 but dropped out, citing a lack of funding. She would go on to endorse Joe Biden as the nominee.
As Vice President, her historic appointment got off to a rocky start. Tasked with sorting out a messy and highly contentious migration crisis, Harris struggled to find her feet.
She suffered from persistently low approval ratings.
Critics said that she ran a disorganised and dysfunctional office, but supporters said she was being deliberately sidelined.
Harris was certainly less prominent in office than many had expected.
But when the Supreme Court - where Brett Kavanaugh now sat - overturned Roe vs Wade, paving the way for states to roll back access to abortion, Kamala Harris found her voice as the administration’s most active campaigner for women’s reproductive rights.
"This is a healthcare crisis," she told an audience in Illinois in the minutes after the Supreme Court decision was announced.
"Millions of women in America will go to bed tonight without access to the health care and reproductive care that they had this morning, without access to the same health care or reproductive health care that their mothers and grandmothers had for 50 years," she said.
But Republicans have been quick to discredit her. Former president Trump tried out a new nickname for her - "laughing Kamala" - at a rally in the wake of the Presidential debate.
Trump was excoriating about her in a casual exchange with unknown onlookers on a golf course recently.
"She's so bad, she's so pathetic," he said.
A spokesperson for his campaign Karoline Leavitt called the Vice President "incompetent".
"She's proven to be the weakest, worst Vice President in history," she said.
But the Trump camp's newfound focus on the VP shows just how much they are taking her seriously.
That might be because Harris has pulled very slightly ahead of Trump in some polls.
But the fact that other names were being tossed around by Democratic strategists and commentators as a potential nominee won't have helped to bolster her candidacy.
Some democrats have even called for an open contest for the nomination at the Democratic National Convention in August.
Supporters of Kamala Harris have tried to suppress discussion about anyone else but her, arguing the party needed to show the electorate a united front.
A memo circulated by Democratic Party operatives last weekend said Harris was the only candidate with democratic legitimacy because she was already on the ticket.
Trying to sidestep her in favour of somebody else could have disastrous consequences for the party in the ballot box the memo warned.
"We would [then] head into a high-stakes, high-uncertainty convention, at which point we would skip over our democratically elected first Black woman VP for a (likely) white candidate who has no comparable national profile, no claim to democratic legitimacy, and has never been tested on the national stage," the memo stated.
"This candidate would then have less than three months to heal the party’s rifts, somehow mend ties with Black voters, and stand up a full national campaign to beat Trump," it stated.
At the age of 59, Kamala Harris is some 20 years younger than Joe Biden and Donald Trump. Her relative youth is seen as an asset in a race dogged by concerns over age.
If there ends up being a move to pass her over in favour of another candidate, she is unlikely to go without a fight.
