Per NBC, the answer appears to be “technically yes but actually no.” She’s not out of the race, she’s just … doing other stuff right now.

Much of that stuff is fundraising, I realize, but the flaw in doing that instead of hitting the trail is that dollars tend to dry up once your polling lands in the toilet because no one in the early states ever sees you anymore. Money follows popularity in political campaigns, not vice versa.

Maybe Harris is running the ol’ Giuliani 2008 strategy of skipping all of the early states and focusing entirely on Florida.

When Harris returns to Iowa this weekend for the Polk County Democrats’ Steak Fry, it’ll be her first trip to the state in over a month. She’s visited just 18 of Iowa’s 99 counties so far.

It’s been more than two months since her last visit to South Carolina, where Harris, who is African American, is counting on a robust showing among black voters who make up the majority of the state’s Democratic primary voters.

And Harris has been in New Hampshire just once in the last two months.

Old Man Biden’s made seven trips to the early states in the past six weeks or so and has already visited more counties in Iowa than she has despite having entered the race much later. Someone drag Officer Harris out of the donut shop and tell her to get back on the beat.

Or don’t. It’s already too late. Let her enjoy her cruller.

Kamala Harris’ support is plunging in Iowa, where she’s seen a 13-point drop since July, according to a new poll.

Notably, the survey, commissioned by Focus on Rural America and taken after the third presidential debate in Houston, was conducted by Harris’ chief pollster, David Binder…

The new survey, conducted Sept. 14-17, shows Harris sliding into sixth place at 5 percent, with Biden at 25 percent retaking the lead he lost over the summer. Harris recently embarked on a statewide bus tour and was the first in the field to run ads in Iowa. The Harris campaign did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Between this and yesterday’s NBC survey, there’s a distinct “Scott Walker 2016” stench coming off of her right now. But I think she’ll soldier on, believing that she could rocket into the top tier again at any moment if Biden has a lethal rhetorical stumble of some sort and black voters in South Carolina are suddenly in play.

If nothing else, it’ll be interesting to see how she uses her time at the next few debates. Her only big moment of the race to date came at Biden’s expense at the first one but trying to reprise that would be perilous for her. Realistically, Harris should be playing for a VP spot at this point, and realistically, the only type of nominee whom she’d “balance” demographically on the ticket is a white male, i.e. Bernie Sanders or Biden himself. The obvious strategy for her now is to go easy on Joe to ingratiate herself to him and maybe even start carrying his water by trying to damage Elizabeth Warren on his behalf. That’s risky too, though, since Warren is probably the “true” frontrunner — she outpolls Biden when Dem voters’ first and second choices are combined, she’s the only candidate in the race drawing very enthusiastic crowds, and the overwhelmingly white electorates in Iowa and New Hampshire play to her demographic strengths. Harris won’t be VP to Warren (I think?) since Democrats would worry how an all-woman ticket would be received, but Attorney General in a Warren administration, God help us, seems feasible.

As long as she doesn’t hit Warren too hard on the stump this fall, that is. So what does Harris do?

Anyway, she’s leaving the donut shop soon:

“I’m f****** moving to Iowa,” Sen. Kamala Harris joked to Sen. Hirono (before she noticed me) pic.twitter.com/dv0PRWLY8g

— Matt Laslo (@MattLaslo) September 18, 2019

While you mull that, via the Free Beacon, here’s NBC not sugarcoating the state of her campaign. “Rather bleak, rather uncertain” about sums it up.