The Kamala Harris basement campaign seemed to be working for a while. Lots of Democrats were understandably excited to be getting rid of aging Joe Biden as their standard-bearer. And a carefully choreographed rollout of Harris, then Walz gave them weeks of positive news to build on. But about 3-4 weeks ago the air started going out of the balloon. 

The national media started noticing that Harris had decided to sidestep them in favor of radio interviews (where she could read from her notes) or local swing-state interviews which were unlikely to make national news if she got herself in trouble. The Harris campaign was clearly trying to run out the clock but you almost feel that it wasn't working. They were risking letting Trump climb back into the race.

Jump forward to today and with just two weeks left to go, most polls show things have been drifting toward Trump nationally. The race now appears to be a tie in every battleground state.

Most of the major national polls have showed a shift toward Mr. Trump since their prior surveys:

Mr. Trump led by two points nationwide in a Fox News poll; Ms. Harris led by two points in its prior poll.

Fairleigh Dickinson University found Ms. Harris ahead by three nationwide, while she led by seven in its prior poll.

Marquette Law School found a tied race, compared with a six-point lead for Ms. Harris in August.

Ipsos fielded several polls showing Ms. Harris up between two and four points over the last week, compared with leads of mostly five or six points in September.

Emerson College found a tied race, compared with a two-point lead for Ms. Harris in its prior poll.

Again, what matters here is not what any individual poll says but the agreement of all the polls (except for Marist which showed Harris up 5) that the race is moving toward Trump. It looks like Harris' run-out-the-clock strategy didn't work.

With polls now showing a tie the obvious question becomes, how reliable with the polling be this year?  It has underestimated Trump's support before. Is it doing so again this year? Unfortunately the answer to that question is that no one really knows.

Will the polls be wrong again this cycle?

It’s the question I probably get most, for obvious reasons. Unfortunately, it’s not an easy one to answer, and one reason might surprise you: Pollsters still don’t know exactly why the polls underestimated Donald J. Trump four years ago.

As a post-election report by professional pollsters put it: “Identifying conclusively why polls overstated the Democratic-Republican margin relative to the certified vote appears to be impossible with the available data.”

The exact explanation matters. Under some theories, polls may be much better in 2024; under others, pollsters are still vulnerable to another misfire.

So the polls could be right this time out and we could be looking at the tightest of tie races. Or, the polls could be underestimating Trump's support again and Trump might actually be ahead by 3-4 points in every battleground state, which would make for a very sad election night for Democrats. 

I can only guess as the outcome but at this moment it does feel as if this is slipping away from the Dems and maybe they know it too. But of course there are still 2 weeks to go and cornered animals are dangerous, as the saying goes. There's no telling what October surprise Democrats have been holding onto just in case things look desperate.