What the hell is this “debate” about whether Kamala Harris should call Donald Trump a fascist? It’s too … what? Too aggressive? Too in your face? It risks backlash?

Sorry, but that’s the advice of the people who’ve been advising Democrats to lose elections for years. The bottom line is this, and it’s really simple. In the last 10 days of a campaign, you’re either playing offense or defense. And if you’re playing defense, you’re going to lose.

The fascism charge is offense. Period. End of debate. Now, within that debate, there are more subtle conversations to be entertained. Should it be the main line of attack, or should it be a side attack? Should she bank everything on it? Fine, let’s discuss those things. But the big question ought to be settled. She should call Trump a fascist. She should do it because it’s playing offense, and she should do it because it’s true.

Trump is playing offense. It’s all lies as usual, but for some people, his just standing up there and saying things confuses and convinces them. At his rally Thursday night, Trump claimed he was “leading by a lot” in the polls. He ticked off a number of states where he claimed to be leading by “a lot.” He’s leading in none of them. He may be 2 in the occasional poll in Arizona, but that’s still margin-of-error territory. Most reputable polls have Arizona dead even. The only recent one where Trump is 3 is from a conservative pollster. And 3 is still within the margin of error.

But he says this stuff, and some people buy it. He also went on some riff about how Harris is weak and Xi Jinping can’t wait to steamroll her. This is obvious sexist garbage, to which her immediate response, if she deigns to give one, ought to be, “Well, Donald Trump and I went face to face. Who kicked whose ass across the stage and back? I hope Xi was watching that!” But still: Some people will see that Trump riff and just believe it.

It’s so important, in these closing days, to exude confidence, to look like a winner, to be on offense. A close election like this one might come down to this question of what’s on swing voters’ minds in these final days. Trump wants them thinking Harris is an incompetent failure. She wants them thinking he’s too dangerous and risky. Ergo—fascism and democracy.

Trump himself flung this door wide open when he said in an interview that he’d use the military to go after his political opponents. That’s what prompted John Kelly to speak to The New York Times. It may prove to be a key moment in this campaign if others follow, particularly James Mattis.

Harris has worked all that into her stump speech. Thursday night in Atlanta, she invoked Kelly’s remarks, and she quoted him quoting Trump to the effect that Hitler “did some good things.” I’d love to see her play with that a little. “Let’s see … what good things did Hitler do? He loved his dog. He didn’t smoke or drink …” Get some laughs at Trump’s expense.

I love the fact that she’s speaking next week from the same spot on the Ellipse where Trump gave his January 6 address. Her speech really needs to be blunt and direct. And here’s a crucial point: She needs to say something new in that speech. She needs to make news—to level some charge at Trump that she hasn’t leveled. That’s playing offense, and it will put him on defense.

Another advantage to all this is that it could goad Trump. Karl Rove was on Fox this week criticizing Trump for going off script. Harris can force more of this. If she needles him about Hitler, for example, she can goad him into talking about Hitler. Who knows what he’d say? He might actually list a few of those good things Hitler did. That’d be news.

She still needs to talk about the economy. And she is. That’s actually still her main message, and it should remain so. In talking-head land, they too often assume that if Harris starts talking about X, that means she’s stopped talking about Y. It’s ridiculous. If you look at the ads the Harris campaign is running the most in the swing states, they’re practically all economy-based.

And the ones that aren’t about the economy are about the other issue that needs to be central in the home stretch: abortion. Some say she’s wasting her time in Houston tonight because she has no chance of winning Texas. But that isn’t the point. The point is to highlight the cruelty of Texas’s anti-abortion law. And to share a stage with a Houston native named Beyoncé. And with Willie Nelson too!

So she’s sticking to the core messages. But fascism and democracy—and Adolf Hitler, specifically, because more people know who Hitler was than know what fascism is, and because she might get Trump to talk about Hitler—absolutely have to be part of the closing mix. Play offense. Look strong. Step on his neck. It’s time.

Polls, polls, polls. Way too many polls, way too much media coverage and obsession with polls. Right? Well … it depends on which ones. Because there is one set of polls that isn’t driving much press coverage at all, and I find it interesting and telling.

Since the day Kamala Harris got in the race, she has consistently led Donald Trump on the question of voter enthusiasm. She led by a lot when she first entered the race in late July because Democratic enthusiasm for Joe Biden was at a serious low, and because the mere fact that the Democrats made a change—and that she came out of gate with such swagger—made rank-and-file Democrats feel such a burst of relief.

That carried on through the Democratic convention. A Gallup poll from late August (right after the convention) showed Democratic enthusiasm at 79 percent—one point short of the all-time high, which was during the 2008 Barack Obama–Hillary Clinton primary—and Republican enthusiasm at just 64 percent.

Since then, Republican enthusiasm has gotten closer to Democratic levels, but in the several recent polls I looked over this week, Democratic enthusiasm was still higher. This Gallup result from October 6 was representative. When asked if they were more enthusiastic this time around than in previous elections, 80 percent of Democrats said yes, as did 75 percent of Republicans.

So Democratic voters are in fact enthusiastic about Harris—a shade more enthusiastic than Republican voters are about Trump. But ask yourself: Is that reality reflected in the media coverage you see? My own answer to that question is a thundering no.

This is admittedly unscientific, and undoubtedly, I’ve missed some stuff. But what I mostly see and hear and read is this: Trump voters love their man (and many do, of course). Black and Hispanic voters are tepid on Harris. She hasn’t “made the sale.” Black men in particular are skeptical. She’s in a danger zone.

Some of this is true and borne out by polling, and of course it’s necessary to report on it. But meanwhile, where, in the media narrative, is the Democratic enthusiasm? Where are the voters who admire and even adore Harris and can’t wait to go pull the lever for her?

They’re mostly invisible.

They’re mostly invisible because they are chiefly based in two groups, neither of whom is of the remotest interest to the press. The first is college-educated people, mostly white but of all races. These people’s votes count just like anybody else’s, but to political journalism, they don’t count because they’re not real Americans. Real Americans eat carb-heavy breakfasts in diners in Altoona and Saginaw. They don’t eat tofu scrambles in Bucks County or Buckhead. They didn’t attend private colleges, they don’t go to gyms, they don’t drive hybrids, they don’t drink lattes.

So as far as political journalism is concerned, these voters don’t exist. It’s all a bit paradoxical and frankly a little twisted, since virtually all journalists are members of the tofu-scramble class, but that only accentuates the matter, because journalists feel a collective guilt about all the above that makes them dismiss voters like them as uninteresting.

And sure, there’s a dog-bites-man element to those voters backing a candidate such as Harris. But I submit there are still stories there. Are these voters as enthusiastic as they were in 2020? Are they out there door knocking and phone banking? Are donations coming in at high levels or low from those zip codes?

The other invisible group—and this is a far worse error—is Black women. If you Google something like “Black women Harris enthusiasm,” you’ll see a bushelful of articles from late July, when she first got in the race, when the #WinWithBlackWomen network famously enlisted 400,000 Black women to join a Zoom meeting the very night that Harris became the presumptive nominee. I saw a number of stories from that period.

But since the heat of the campaign post–Labor Day? I don’t see much. In fact, the first page of search results for the search term mentioned above includes a bunch of articles from July, a couple from August—and exactly one from September. Was it in The New York Times? The Washington Post? Was it an Associated Press or Reuters piece?

No. It was in The Atlanta Voice, the Black community newspaper in Atlanta.

Black women, as usual, are invisible to the political media. Oh, Oprah’s town hall made news. But generally speaking, if you’re a Black woman in this country and you want a bunch of microphones shoved in front of your face at election time, you’ll be way ahead of the game if you’re willing to say that Kamala Harris just doesn’t speak to you for some reason and Donald Trump is a savvy businessman.

Yes, again, there’s a dog-bites-man aspect to stories about Black women backing Harris. But isn’t there also a dog-bites-man quality to white rural voters backing Trump? Of course there is. And yet, I’m still seeing those stories, still seeing those people interviewed on cable news. Why? Because the political media (reporters, but I think mostly editors at mainstream outlets) are terrified of being seen as liberal. Of missing the Trump story, of opening themselves up to accusations of out-of-touch elitism.

The right is so effective at lobbing this grenade that mainstream outlets have collectively come to sense that there is a professional price to be paid for ignoring Trump voters. But there is no professional price to be paid for ignoring Black women. They’re ignored all the time anyway.

Is Harris in real trouble among Black voters? Maybe. Maybe not. This week’s NBC poll has her beating Trump 84–8 among Black respondents in battleground states. That’s up from 82–12 a month ago (Trump lost a third of his Black support! Isn’t that a story?), and it’s on par with Biden’s 2020 national margin among Black voters over Trump of 87–12, or indeed will be better than Biden’s margin, if Trump stays in single digits.

It’s a close race. There’s a lot to worry about. I worry every day, and you should too. But you should also remember this: Democratic voter enthusiasm is high—higher than Republican enthusiasm, according to numerous polls. From the way this race is being covered, you’d never know that. Harris’s enthusiastic voters, especially Black women, aren’t “real Americans.” They’re being erased from the narrative. By the “liberal” media.

Donald Trump announced Wednesday during a speech in Scranton, Pennsylvania, that he’ll be playing Madison Square Garden. His campaign has rented the self-proclaimed “World’s Most Famous Arena” for Sunday, October 27, and Trump said it means that “we’re going to make a play for New York.”

Trump is not going to win New York. Harris is 14 points ahead in the Empire State in the current FiveThirtyEight averages. That’s closer than the 2020 result of 23 points, but it still isn’t spitting distance. So we can say it’s a waste of his time and money, and that’s a good thing. But it’s not entirely stupid either, and there’s a lesson in this for Kamala Harris and her campaign as we wind toward the home stretch.

But before we get to that, let’s just pause to note the creepy historical echo of a neofascist rally taking place at Madison Square Garden, because there was one of those before, and it’s the first thing I (and I’m sure many other people) thought of when I heard this news. I mean the famous rally held in the Garden (then a completely different building, but still named Madison Square Garden) on February 20, 1939, by the German American Bund and its leader, Fritz Kuhn.

This was a pro-Nazi rally. The stage was adorned with a gigantic image of George Washington surrounded by stars and stripes. There were also swastikas and Hitler salutes galore among the 22,000 attendees. No, I’m not saying there will be swastikas this time around, although one can’t help but wonder if the various white supremacist groups backing Trump will send contingents. The guy plays to semi-empty houses that are half the Garden’s size, so something’s going to need to be done to paper the room. If he hews to the custom of, say, GOP conventions, he’ll invite as many Black supporters as he can up on the stage with him.

So no, he’s not going to win New York, and yes, there are disturbing historical resonances at work here. But here’s the one way in which this rally isn’t stupid or offensive.

At this point in a presidential campaign, establishing momentum becomes important—having the look of a winner. As I’ve often said, the swing voters who’ll decide the election don’t have strong political allegiances; these are people who view politics, as Wisconsin Democratic chairman Ben Wikler recently said, the way we political-junkie types view Olympic sports—we know they exist, and we pay attention for a brief period every four years, and that’s it. We choose to root for non-American Olympic athletes based on a bunch of emotional and nonrational factors—whether we have warm or cool feelings toward their country, whether we like the way they carry themselves, the way they smile—and maybe most of all, whether they have a shot at winning. In the 100-meter dash, we’re more likely to cheer for the Jamaican who has a real chance of medaling than the guy from Norway or whatever; nothing against Norway.

So campaigns need to do things in the closing weeks to communicate momentum and exude winner-ness. Having an unexpected rally at an unexpected and famous place qualifies. It shakes........

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