Kamala Harris ‘s campaign to be president has stalled. What momentum there was coming out of her coronation in Chicago last month has dissipated.

The latest nationwide polls give Harris a two to three point lead over Trump, which is within the usual polling margin of error.

The latest CNN poll gives Trump a five-point lead in Arizona, Harris a six-point lead in Wisconsin and five points ahead in Michigan. In both these states Harris is doing significantly better than Biden.

But in Nevada, Georgia and Pennsylvania its nip and tuck, with barely a single point separating them. In Pennsylvania, perhaps the most crucial swing state of all, its even-stevens with both candidates on 47 percent.

Harris’s best hope is that Trump continues with his meandering, unfocused, petty campaign based in pathetic personal insults rather than attacking her paltry record and policy flip-flops. There’s little to indicate Harris knows how to put her show back on the road without Trump’s help. Team Harris has her hermetically sealed from all unscripted human interaction.

Trump and his running mate, JD Vance, are hardly running a textbook campaign. It is curiously underpowered. But at least between them they’ve given over 30 interviews, allowing a degree of scrutiny on where they stand.

Harris survived last week’s highly-controlled CNN interview without major gaffes, though she hardly established herself as a woman of substance. Her campaign managers are not minded to take any more risks. They are keeping her out of harm’s way by avoiding media scrutiny and unscripted interactions like the plague.

This is being taken to ridiculous lengths. When she walked from her limo to Air Force Two on Monday she ostentatiously plugged her headphones in both ears, held the phone in her hand and acted like she was listening intently.

This is a well-known ruse for avoiding media questions, signalling ‘can’t talk, I’m on an important call’. The problem is Harris is not very good at it. She was clearly cosplaying (badly) and somebody needs to tell her when you’re using earbuds you don’t need to hold the phone to your ear. Harris is beloved by Hollywood but on this performance she’s no Oscar winner.

It’s all rather pitiful for someone bidding to be leader of the free world. But you can understand her team’s concerns. There is something disturbingly phoney and shallow about her.

On Wednesday at a rally in New Hampshire she went off script to condemn the latest shooting atrocity, this time at a Georgia high school. You could almost hear the hearts of Team Harris palpitating. With good cause, because her extemporising about the tragic murder of four began with her riffing: ‘I love Generation Z. I just love Generation Z.’

Bizarre. Democrats like to paint Trump and his running mate, JD Vance, as weird. I can see that. But I think you could file Harris under the same category.

I suspect Harris will struggle to get her campaign back on the rails almost as much as Trump. She’s running a Potemkin village of a presidential bid: look behind the facade and there’s nothing there. Her website is still unburdened with anything as vulgar as policy. It’s a pop-up campaign that’s lost its novelty and already looks frayed at the edges. Pop ups, after all, are not built to last.

Nor has Tim Walz, her running mate, turned out to be quite the asset she hoped — the homespun, folksy, no nonsense Western dad chosen to counter Trump attacks that she’s a San Francisco radical.

Turns out down-home Tim, in reality the left-wing governor of a left-wing state (Minnesota), is too often a stranger to the truth for someone who’d be only a heartbeat away from the Oval Office. Or, as my old mother would have said, he’s a fibber.

He fibbed when running for Congress in 2006 about his 1995 arrest for drunk and reckless driving, caught DUI in his home state of Nebraska doing 96mph in a 55mph zone. It was all a misunderstanding he claimed. By 2018 he had to admit it was all too true.

He fibbed again when he claimed he owed his two kids to IVF treatment which, he said, Vance wanted to ban. His wife had to explain that she hadn’t used IVF. Nor does Vance (or Trump) want to ban IVF.

He fibbed for a third time by asserting he’d carried weapons ‘in war’ when, for all the time he spent in the Army National Guard, he’d never been deployed to a war zone.

And he was at least economical with the truth by claiming the credit as a football coach for turning a team of losers into state champions. Turns out he was a volunteer assistant coach, not the head coach.

Walz has become synonymous with promulgating self-serving half truths.

A chunk of his extended family in Nebraska has made a point of saying they’re voting for Trump. To be fair, they are only loosely connected to him. More damaging was his brother saying he was not the ‘type of character’ you’d want in the White House. And brothers can cause prominent candidates serious problems. Ask Jimmy Carter.

Nor has Tim Walz, her running mate, turned out to be quite the asset she hoped — the homespun, folksy, no nonsense Western dad chosen to counter Trump attacks.

Moreover, Walz seems as determined as Harris to avoid proper media scrutiny. When asked at a Minnesota fair about the murder of six hostages, including an American, in Gaza he simply turned on his heels and fled. It was not a moment to elevate his vice presidential credentials.

The campaign is reportedly refusing to subject him to any major broadcast interrogations on the basis that ‘he might not have a full command of where Harris is on every issue’. Which I guess is fair enough. Neither is Harris.

Both Harris and Trump are currently concentrating on their battles for the base. Both are campaigning to ensure the maximum turnout of their cult followers. Neither is doing much to reach out beyond their base to moderates and independents who have yet to decide how to vote. Which one does that first and effectively will likely win in November.

This is what makes next Tuesday’s Trump v Harris debate in Philadelphia so crucial. It was rightly said that the first party to ditch their gerontocratic candidate would take the initiative. The Democrats did just that which is why they are back in the race.

Now the outcome could eventually be determined by which candidate is able to appeal beyond their base.

I doubt we’ll see again a debate as decisive as the one at the end of June which dashed Biden’s hopes of running again. But the winner on Tuesday night will be the one who is able to reach out beyond their true believers. The stakes could not be higher.