The first seven months of the Trump administration has seen an ever-changing coterie of high-profile Democrats probing the possibility of launching a 2020 run to take back the White House, from Joe Biden and Cory Booker, to Kirsten Gillibrand and Deval Patrick, and maybe even Hillary Clinton for a third time. The latest name to join this carousel of political ambition is recently elected California Senator Kamala Harris. Her rise to the top of the 2020 shortlist has been long in the making, with Democratic bigwigs recognizing her potential star power as early as 2008, when she campaigned for Obama.

Harris’s rise has produced a fiery debate among liberals and the Left. Leftists and progressives have come out in strong opposition to Harris’s candidacy, with some declaring #NeverKamala and some high-profile Bernie Sanders supporters, such as National Nurses United executive director RoseAnn DeMoro, making clear their lack of enthusiasm for her candidacy. For some prominent liberals, this pushback is simply the product of virulent racism and sexism among an imagined (and non-existent) all-white, all-male, Sanders-supporting base.

While most Harris-supporting liberals wouldn’t go this far, there is deep suspicion among some Democrats that opposition to Harris is motivated by similarly less-than-noble motives — namely, that it’s part of a project of poisoning the well for any potential challengers of a Bernie Sanders or Sanders-like candidacy in 2020.