Conservative media is full of "Harris is panicking" stories which are fun to read but beside the point. Kamala Harris, like Donald Trump, had a strategy in place after the Democratic National Convention in August and has stayed with it, despite the ups and downs in polling.
The strategy was to energize the base, get them to the polls, and try not to step in it before election day.
This election, like every election since 2008, has been a "base" election. The candidate best able to excite their base and, more importantly, make sure they get to the polls to vote, wins.
Kamala Harris is having a difficult time energizing Democratic constituencies. She's not "panicking" in the sense that she's going to alter her strategy and run around with her hair on fire. From her perspective, she has to keep plugging away and hope that the vaunted Democratic turnout machine does its job and gets her voters to the polls.
Harris was always going to spend the final weeks attacking Trump as dangerous and a "fascist." Having spent more than a billion dollars on her campaign and political ads already, her closing argument isn't as important as moving the vast numbers of her supporters to the polls.
Trump's closing argument is no different than his argument all along: Biden-Harris is destroying America and I'm the only one who can save us. It's proved to be a potent argument in swing states. And as the race stands now with less than three weeks before the beginning of the vote-counting process, that simple argument has him in the lead.
An NPR analysis of the most recent polls in seven swing states has Trump ahead in two of them and the race virtually tied in the other five. Since polls are snapshots of the race at a particular time, compared to the most recent snapshots of the race, Trump has improved his position vis-à-vis Harris.
That's been the story for the last month: Trump gaining strength and Harris losing it. You'd have to say that, looking at the seven swing states, the 2024 election is Trump's to lose.
Now, Trump has taken over the lead in an average of the polls in the seven swing states for the first time since Harris got in the race.
Surveys in the past couple of weeks have moved in Trump’s direction, and the leads Harris had in the most competitive and critical states have mostly evaporated. Everything is still within the margin of error and incredibly close — just 0.34 percentage points separate Trump and Harris. But the consistency of the change — and the fact that it’s all in Trump’s direction — has Democrats concerned.
When President Biden dropped out of the race and Harris stepped in, Democratic enthusiasm went up, and the trajectory of the race moved in her direction. But since then, Trump’s team has gone intensely negative, looking to drag Harris’ numbers down.
It's not so much the m margin that Trump is currently ahead. It's the direction the polls have been moving in the last six weeks. Harris has yet to arrest that Trump momentum and unless/until she does, her goose is as good as cooked.
Related: No Matter Who Wins in November, America Is Moving Inexorably to the Right
It's certainly not a guarantee that Trump will win. Some Republicans are very worried about Elon Musk's voter turnout operation. Trump aides have also expressed their displeasure with the GOTV effort. My experience has been that GOTV operations rarely win a candidate the election but sometimes lose it.
Musk has poured $75 million into the PAC that Trump asked to set up and run the GOTV operation. That's a healthy sum and should be enough to build a quality GOTV organization.
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