At a town hall event this week, Kamala Harris was asked a simple question which laid bare 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 at the CNN event on Wednesday, followed up with: “And how do you plan to overcome them?”
Ms Harris, who will become the most powerful person in the world if she wins the presidential election in just over a week, floundered before confessing that she struggled to answer questions or think on her feet.
“Some might call that a weakness, especially if you’re in an interview or being asked a certain question, and you’re expected to have the right answer right away,” she said, turning indecisively between her questioner and CNN host Anderson Cooper. “But that’s how I work.”
Critics say Ms Harris’s failure to grasp “the right answer right away” sums up why the vice-president’s campaign seems to have gone so wrong this week.
As the polls tighten ahead of election day, Ms Harris, who has long been criticised for her “word salad” responses, is struggling to find the answer to win back voters drifting towards Donald Trump.
Commentators claim that her campaign has become desperate in the last week, looking for 11th-hour giveaways while throwing haymakers at her Republican opponent in the hope of moving the needle.
Recent polling shows 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 mangled 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 started distancing herself from Joe Biden, having previously mirrored his policy positions and stuck close to the man who dropped out of the presidential race to endorse her.
Since becoming the Democratic nominee this summer, Ms Harris has spent much of her time treating Trump as a sideshow and rising above the fray.
This week, she called her opponent a “fascist” and pointedly noted that he had been compared to Hitler.
“The campaign is in free-fall and she is absolutely desperate, grasping at any straw she can,” Charlie Gerow, a Republican strategist based in the swing state of Pennsylvania, told The Telegraph.
“Somehow believing that accusing Donald Trump of being a fascist is a winning closing argument – nothing could be further from the truth. They’re in real trouble and they know it.”
An anonymous 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 Joe Biden and Barack Obama’s election victories.
They also suggested that North Carolina, at the top of Ms Harris’s target list, was “slipping away” as the race entered its final strait.
This week, a Telegraph poll found that Trump was ahead in four of the seven swing states, and tied in two others. Ms Harris led in just one state and by a single point: Wisconsin.
With the White House seemingly slipping out of her grasp, the vice-president has decided on a change in tactics.
Earlier this month, she told ABC’s The View that there was “not a thing that comes to mind” when asked what she would have done differently from Mr Biden.
Seemingly spooked by the Trump attack adverts endlessly replaying the message and tying her to an unpopular president, she has embarked on a different course.
Parting ways with Biden
“Mine will not be a continuation of the Biden administration,” she told NBC News on Tuesday, saying she would part ways with her former running mate’s economic policy to bring down grocery and house prices.
The same evening, she backed plans to double the federal minimum wage to $15 an hour – not on her NBC News interview, which had been widely trailed, but on a segment aired afterwards.
As a result, it went under the radar for most news outlets except The Telegraph and Bloomberg. NBC is yet to publish an article on its own scoop.
Mr Gerow was scathing about how the campaign had failed to tee up the announcement in the media.
“The message has to be clear – you can’t just hit it once and run,” he said. “It has to be driven home with advance work, and it has to be repeated.”
Ms Harris was apparently trying to draw a contrast with Trump, who dodged a question about the minimum wage at a campaign stop at McDonald’s on Sunday.
Standing at a drive-through window in Feasterville, Pennsylvania, the Republican – who had stripped off his suit jacket to don a McDonald’s apron – instead praised the “great staff” for their work.
Ms Harris and her supporters have long used her claim to have worked at the fast food chain to burnish working-class credentials, while Trump has accused her of lying.
Neither has been able to provide evidence, but the Republican won the headline war as he worked the deep fat fryer and handed out food to customers.
After riding high in the polls for much of her time in the race, the wear-and-tear of campaigning and months of political attacks seem to be catching up with Ms Harris.
So much so that she cannot even share her biggest weakness, without falling victim to it.
Both Democrats and Republicans have struggled to find a strategy that works against Trump, a fixture on the political scene for almost a decade. If she wants to walk through the doors of the Oval Office in January, Ms Harris will have to find the answer soon.
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