The other day, while driving along the busy interstate in the metropolitan area of a crucial swing state, I saw one of those newish LED billboards lit up with that 10-year-old glam pic of a smiling Kamala Harris. Along the top was the following message: “Grocery prices are too damn high!”

It’s hard to argue against that claim. Grocery prices are indeed too damn high — 33% higher for a pound of chicken breast, 44% higher for a pound of ground beef, 50% higher for a pound of coffee, 54% higher for a loaf of bread, and a whopping 126% higher for a dozen eggs than they were under Donald Trump.

And those colossal price increases amount to a bone-grinding daily tax on American families — and not just those families who make more than $400,000 a year, which is what the Biden-Harris administration promised us during the 2020 campaign.

Remarkably, though, the aforementioned billboard was an ad for Kamala Harris, not against her. Beneath the “too damn high” headline, the ad claimed that Harris has “a plan” for lowering grocery prices. Never mind that her plan is to attack those “price-gouging” grocers — you know, those same gouging gougers who are gouging away with their 2.06% profit margins. Never mind all that. Kamala Harris has a plan that’s different from the one that she and Joe Biden have employed for the past 1,349 days.

This is the predicament that Harris finds herself in just 36 days before the election: The economy is once again the issue, and the American people remember that it was better under Donald Trump. (Harris supporters made a big deal recently about a poll conducted between August 1 and 5 that found Harris leading Trump 42-41 on the issue of the economy. This is what we call an outlier, and we encourage the Harris campaign to take solace in it.)

And yet here we are, in a horse race between Harris and Trump, with Harris exactly two points ahead of Trump nationally, 49.1 to 47.1, according to the RealClearPolitics average of polls. Those numbers are meaningless, though, so long as we have an Electoral College. And in the RCP average of the battleground states, Trump leads Harris by a razor-thin 0.1%.

Individual battleground polling from AtlasIntel, whom lefty statistician Nate Silver notes was the most accurate polling group of the 2020 presidential election, also favors Donald Trump:

A survey of likely voters in battleground states from AtlasIntel found that Trump is ahead in Michigan (50.6 percent to 47.2) and Pennsylvania (51 percent to 48.1). AtlasIntel said the former president also has a “narrow” advantage in the toss-up states of Arizona (49.8 percent to 48.6), Georgia (49.6 percent to 49) and Wisconsin (49.7 percent to 48.2). Harris is leading in North Carolina (50.5 percent to 48.1) and Nevada (50.5 percent to 47.7).

If Trump is winning even narrowly in the battlegrounds, it spells big trouble for Harris. That’s because there are no “shy” Harris voters, and history has shown that there are plenty of shy Trump voters — voters who are uncomfortable telling pollsters that they’re not voting for the woman of color and are instead voting for the old white guy, the convicted felon, the “existential threat to our democracy,” the Dictator on Day One.

Polling in recent weeks had reflected a wave of enthusiasm for Harris — which is understandable, given the mainstream media’s cheerleading and the campaign’s cleverly scripted advertising assault on low-information voters. But all that seems to have dissipated lately, and a key indicator from Gallup brings more bad tidings for Team Harris:

Nearly all Gallup measures that have shown some relationship to past presidential election outcomes or that speak to current perceptions of the two major parties favor the Republican Party over the Democratic Party. Chief among these are Republican advantages in U.S. adults’ party identification and leanings, the belief that the GOP rather than the Democratic Party is better able to handle the most important problem facing the country, Americans’ dissatisfaction with the state of the nation, and negative evaluations of the economy with a Democratic administration in office.

Indeed, in the 10 “Key Measures” Gallup tracks, the Republicans lead in eight and are tied in the other two. Furthermore, 48% of U.S. adults identify as or lean Republican, while only 45% identify as or lean Democrat. Why is this important? As Gallup notes: “Democrats have won presidential elections in years in which they had larger-than-normal advantages in party affiliation, including 1992, 1996, 2008, 2012 and 2020. In years when the advantage was narrower — 2004 and 2016, for example — Republicans won in the electoral college if not also the popular vote.”

The Harris campaign knows all this, and it also knows that Harris is bleeding support from key Democrat constituencies, such as Hispanics. This is why it’s pushing for a debate hosted by CNN, whom the campaign believes will once again rig the event in Harris’s favor, just like scummy David Muir and Linsey Jones of ABC News did three weeks ago.

That Donald Trump doesn’t think he needs to agree to another debate with Harris is telling. He thinks he’s winning.

Which is why if the Harris campaign were really serious about another debate, it’d be pushing for one hosted by Fox News instead of CNN.