“If Donald Trump were just to shut up for a few days, he would be elected president,” but he just doesn’t understand that, the pollster Frank Luntz told me last week. And he said if Kamala Harris and Tim Walz “would just get real with the American people, that would ensure their election, but they’re too afraid.”

But what does “get real” mean? For Harris, it means putting herself in position to make more meaningful connections with voters who are still on the bubble, what I call the “final 5 percent,” give or take, that I believe she’ll need to win over to ensure a victory.

For many of us, that connection has already been forged, or was an unnecessary condition of our support. For us, not only is Harris the best choice; she’s also the only choice — a must-win candidate as a guard against a rising authoritarianism.

But in mid-September, a quarter of voters said they still needed to learn more about her, compared with just one in 10 who said the same about Trump. There was at least one other modern, major-party nominee whom people similarly said they didn’t know well enough: Mitt Romney in the summer of 2012. And of course, Romney lost that election even though he was basically tied with Barack Obama nationally in the second week of October.

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I had hoped that Harris’s campaign of joy would continue to fill her sails and that her rise in the polls would be inexorable. But according to FiveThirtyEight, Harris and Trump have close-to-even chances of winning.

One way to read this is that voters still need to know more about Harris’s positions, particularly on the issues for which her positions have changed over time. Another way to read this is as an expression of a lack of connection with her as a candidate.

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