At a town hall event this week, Kamala Harris was asked a simple question that revealed why she is struggling to win over undecided voters: “What weaknesses do you bring to the table?”
Joe Donahue, a retail worker, asked the presidential candidate the fateful question during the CNN event on Wednesday, then followed up with, “And how do you plan to overcome it?”
Ms Harris, who will become the most powerful person in the world if she wins the presidential election in just over a week, hesitated before admitting she was struggling to answer questions or think.
“Some might call that a weakness, especially when you're in an interview or asked a certain question and you're expected to have the right answer right away,” she said, switching back and forth indecisively between her questioner and CNN host Anderson Cooper. . “But that's how I work.”
Critics say Ms. Harris's inability to “immediately understand the right answer” sums up why the vice president's campaign appears to have gone so wrong this week.
As polls tighten ahead of Election Day, Ms. Harris, long criticized for her “word salad” responses, is struggling to find the answer to win back voters drifting toward Donald Trump.
Commentators claim her campaign has grown desperate over the past week, looking for eleventh-hour giveaways as she threw haymakers at her Republican opponent in hopes of moving the needle.
Recent polls show the race is still neck-and-neck, but the Democrat is falling behind in the battleground states that will decide the election.
A recent policy announcement on doubling the federal minimum wage was badly garbled and flew under the radar, while campaign officials have broken cover to warn that key states are slipping away.
At the same time, Ms. Harris has begun to distance herself from Joe Biden, having previously mirrored his policy positions and staying close to the man who dropped out of the presidential race to support her.
Since becoming the Democratic nominee this summer, Ms. Harris has spent much of her time treating Trump as an afterthought and rising above the fray.
This week she called her opponent a “fascist” and pointedly noted that he was being compared to Hitler.
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“The campaign is in free fall and it is absolutely desperate and grasping at every straw it can,” Charlie Gerow, a Republican strategist from the swing state of Pennsylvania, told The Telegraph.
“Somehow, accusing Donald Trump of being a fascist is a winning closing argument – nothing could be further from the truth. They are really in trouble and they know it.”
An unnamed Harris campaign official admitted to NBC News this week that the vice president could lose Michigan or Wisconsin, two battleground states that were crucial to the election victories of Joe Biden and Barack Obama.
They also suggested that North Carolina, which topped Ms. Harris's list, was “sliding away” as the race entered its final throes.
This week, a Telegraph poll showed Trump leading in four of the seven swing states and tied in two others. Ms. Harris led in only one state and by one point: Wisconsin.
With the White House seemingly slipping from her grasp, the vice president has decided on a change of tactics.
Earlier this month, she told ABC's The View that there was “nothing that comes to mind” when asked what she would have done differently than Mr. Biden.
Seemingly shocked by Trump attack ads that repeat the message endlessly and tie her to an unpopular president, she has taken a different course.
Saying goodbye to Biden
“Mine will not be a continuation of the Biden administration,” she told NBC News on Tuesday, saying she would say goodbye to her former running mate's economic policies of driving down grocery and housing prices.
That same evening, she supported plans to double the federal minimum wage to $15 an hour — not in her NBC News interview, which was widely followed, but in a segment that aired afterward.
As a result, it went under the radar for most news outlets except The Telegraph and Bloomberg. NBC has yet to publish an article on its own scoop.
Mr Gerow was scathing about the campaign's failure to get the media announcement going.
“The message has to be clear: you can't press it once and run away,” he said. “It needs to be driven home with groundwork, and it needs to be repeated.”
Ms. Harris apparently tried to create a contrast with Trump, who dodged a question about the minimum wage during a campaign stop at McDonald's on Sunday.
Standing at a drive-through window in Feasterville, Pennsylvania, the Republican — who had taken off his suit jacket to put on a McDonald's apron — instead praised the “great staff” for their work.
Ms. Harris and her supporters have long used her claim that she worked at the fast-food chain to burnish the reputation of the working class, while Trump has accused her of lying.
Neither has been able to provide evidence, but the Republican won the headline war when he worked the fryer and handed out food to customers.
After spending much of her time in the race riding high in the polls, the wear and tear of campaigning and months of political attacks appear to be catching up with her.
So much so that she can't even share her greatest weakness without falling victim to it.
Both Democrats and Republicans have struggled to find a strategy that works against Trump, who has been a fixture on the political scene for nearly a decade. If she wants to walk through the doors of the Oval Office in January, Ms. Harris will have to find the answer quickly.
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