US election: why can't Kamala Harris close the deal?

The Democrats are beginning to panic, said Alex Shephard in The New Republic – and who can blame them? It appears Kamala Harris is incapable of establishing a meaningful lead in this election, no matter what her rival says or does.

Donald Trump is running "an explicitly authoritarian, if not outright fascist, campaign". His speeches have become ever more rambling, and his behaviour downright odd. After one of his meetings was interrupted last week by a medical emergency in the crowd, he abruptly abandoned the question-and-answer format and spent half-an-hour swaying on stage to a playlist of his favourite songs, including "Y.M.C.A." and "Nothing Compares 2 U". Yet despite all this, he's still level-pegging with Harris. On three occasions in this campaign, she has had a boost: when she first became the nominee; when she picked Tim Walz as her running mate; and when she bested Trump in the TV debate. Yet each time the momentum has dissipated. Harris just can't close the deal.

If Harris is failing to cut through, it's partly down to the way the media is covering this race, said Jill Filipovic on Slate. We've heard lots about how Harris isn't doing enough interviews or proposing detailed enough policies. Yet reporters have become so inured to Trump's outrages and garbled syntax that these barely receive any attention. Earlier this month, Trump launched into a "eugenicist rant" on a TV show, claiming that many migrants have "murdered far more than one person" and that being a murderer is in people's genes – "we got a lot of bad genes in our country right now". Although this received some coverage, you'd never have guessed from the headlines that he had said something so shocking. However habituated media commentators have become to Trump's behaviour, they need to tell people "exactly what the man who wants to be president is saying".

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There's method to Trump's apparent madness, said Jonah Goldberg in the Los Angeles Times. By amping up his rhetoric, he's seeking to win over undecided voters. This might seem counterintuitive, as such voters are usually thought of as moderates who dislike extremist politics. But those swing voters are relatively few in number. The undecided voters Trump is after are the far larger group who are firmly Republican but might not bother going to the polls. Policy details won't sway them, but "apocalyptic" rhetoric might. Even in 2020, America's "highest-turnout national election in more than a century, a third of eligible voters – about 80 million people – stayed home". If Trump can enlist even a fraction of these people to vote for him, it could win him the White House.

The data experts reckon it will come down to each party's ability to get out the vote, said Peggy Noonan in The Wall Street Journal. The Democrats are believed to have the edge with the ground game. But Harris could do more to help her cause. Having at last started to do more interviews, she now needs to start offering more concessions to conservatives in order to secure the centrist votes she needs to win.

A bit more urgency wouldn't go amiss either, said Maureen Dowd in The New York Times. You still don't get a sense that Harris really knows why she wants to be president. Asked recently whether she would have done anything differently from Joe Biden, she replied that "there is not a thing that comes to mind". This from a supposed change candidate. Why doesn't she just admit that the border policy was "bollixed up" and that Biden wasn't tough enough with Israel's PM, Benjamin Netanyahu? For Harris to win, "we need less mulling and more action in a do-or-die moment".