Opinion | No One Said It Was Going to Be Easy for Kamala Harris

Bret Stephens: Gail, why isn’t Kamala Harris running away with the election? The race in the battleground states is basically a tie, despite Harris spending three times as much money as Donald Trump and having a much bigger ground game — and despite Trump putting in a terrible debate performance and generally making a spectacle of himself, or worse, every time he opens his mouth.Gail Collins: Hmm.I guess I should refrain from pointing out that I’m being asked that question by a person who has yet to commit to voting for Harris himself.Bret: Much as I love to inflate my importance, I think I’m more of a symptom of Harris’s problems than the cause.Gail: Can we blame the Republican Party? It used to specialize in conservative financial options: lower taxes, fewer government services.

But now it’s the voice of the alienated, often rural and less well-educated, who are just ticked off at everybody else.Bret: One of the most interesting recent stories in The Times is an analysis of undecided voters, and their concerns about Trump and Harris.One of most important findings — one that should really concern the Harris campaign — is that a high proportion of undecided voters are young, low-income and Black or Latino.

The concerns about Trump are familiar: “too extreme,” “angered easily” and so on.But some of the concerns about Harris were more surprising.

A Black man in North Carolina said she was “overall untrustworthy.” A Black woman in Michigan worried she was “too liberal.” A Hispanic man in Arizona said he was “unsure about how prepared she is to be president.”Any counsel for the Harris campaign about putting these concerns to rest?Gail: Even though she’s vice president, Harris is a super-new face on the political scene for lots of people, who only pay attention when it’s presidential voting time, if they pay any attention at all.The two tracks to fixing that are lots of TV ads and lots of outreach — rallies, neighborhood volu...