Despite growing up in a middle-class family, Kamala Harris seems to be losing a coalition of voters that would identify as such.

That is what is on display in a recent round of polls from both the New York Times/Siena College and NBC News. The latter shows that Harris and Donald Trump are locked in a dead heat at 48% in a national poll of registered voters.

To make matters more unpredictable, the NBC poll found that 10% of voters may change their minds by Election Day. The divisions between these voters are vast, but there are warning signs the Harris campaign should heed.

One of them is a problem that has plagued Harris since she first set her sights on the Oval Office. That problem is voters’ sentiment toward her. The NBC poll found that voters have a 43% positive view of the vice president and a 49% negative view. These results are virtually flipped from just one month ago.

And even though Joe Biden is no longer on the ballot, NBC found that voters do not have favorable view of Biden’s policies in comparison to Trump’s. According to the poll, 25% of respondents said Biden’s policies helped them, while 45% said they hurt. This is in comparison to 44% who said Trump’s policies benefitted them and the 31% who said they hurt.

While the gender of respondents shows men heavily favoring Trump (+16) and women choosing Harris (+14), Harris is losing the Black and Hispanic voters that have long formed the backbone of Democratic coalition.

The New York Times/Siena poll shows that Harris leads Trump 56% to 37% among Hispanic voters and 78% to 15% among Black voters. This may seem like a commanding lead, but it’s worth noting that Biden got 89% and 92% of those voters respectively.

So, why is Harris losing these voters? One reason may be her lack of substance. The hard work of a political campaign normally sets in after the initial luster, or “honeymoon phase” that occurs after the candidate’s entry wears off. That is the time to buck up, address the people and explain what your vision for the country is.

Enter Harris, who has decided to do none of that. Instead of spending her limited weeks on the campaign trail trying to tell voters what she would do differently than Biden, she has continued the same vacuous platitudes she has been using since she entered race.

Even in friendly environments, this emptiness has been a cause for concern, as was shown when Harris told the hosts of “The View” earlier this month that she couldn’t think of anything specific she would do differently than Biden.

This is the main question voters have for Harris. Yet, here we are, two weeks before Election Day, and other than a few giveaways, no one has any idea what the Democratic candidate for president wants to do if she were chosen to run the country.

This is a problem Democrats should have been able to predict before they tossed Biden overboard and jettisoned her to the top of the ticket. After all, her lack of substance resulted in her dropping out of the 2020 primary race early due to her consistently polling less than 1%.

Despite the declining support, Harris decided to take a chance by going on Fox News to be interviewed by Bret Baier. Kudos to her for going, but if you thought that the awkward answers she gave in response to softball questions by allied interviewers were going to be improved upon before this exercise, you were mistaken.

The Baier interview, in contrast, opened with a high heater when he asked the vice president about illegal immigration. It is consistently ranked as one of the leading concerns of voters, and one in which Donald Trump has an advantage.

“The point is that we have a broken immigration system that needs to be repaired,” Harris said in response to the question of how many illegal immigrants may have entered the country in the past three and a half years.

What broke it? Harris cannot hazard a guess. The best spin she could muster was to blame Republicans for not passing the U.S. Citizenship Act of 2021. The problem is that bill did little to nothing to stem border crossings and instead focused on providing amnesty to immigrants already living the in the United States and did not propose any additional border agents.

To add a fact-check to this answer, the bill in question was introduced while Democrats had control of both the House and Senate. It never made it through a committee vote.

Unfortunately for Harris, she is left with few good options. She cannot blame the policies of the administration she is currently a part of, and she cannot say what she would change because there is no change to bring.

Harris wants to continue the environmental agenda of the Biden administration by squeezing automakers to take losses on electric vehicles that are not selling, as she advocated for all the way back when she was senator in California and has cost her support among workers in Michigan. She has offered no view on the economy other than tax cuts, and she offers nothing on the conflict in the Middle East other than to say “don’t.”

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Republicans have a problem with one man dominating their platform: Trump. For Democrats, it is the opposite. Harris and Biden both are both representatives of their party’s internal machinations and are not perceived as agenda setters. The problem is the Black, male and Hispanic voters the left needs to win elections are peeling off from them. This is not to mention blue-collar union voters.

If it were any other candidate than Trump running against this platform, it would be a blowout at this point. Instead, both parties have decided to stick with their usual playbook: demagoguery and party puppet, respectively. 

The race will be a coin flip decided by whoever can elicit enough excitement to get voters out to the polls. We are in for a nailbiter.

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