Was it just a coincidence that Vice President Kamala Harris showed up, 15 minutes late, to be interviewed by Fox News' Bret Baier a day before Nate Silver's poll aggregation website showed her chances of winning the election slipping below 50%? Probably not.

What may link Harris' slide in the polls and her tardy appearance for an interview in which she served up word salads to Baier's questions on immigration and inflation and then segued, sometimes awkwardly, to denunciations of former President Donald Trump? October hasn't been a good month for Harris or her party.

Nor has it been an entirely bad one. Silver's model still gives her a 47% chance of winning, much higher than Trump's 29% on election eve 2016. But it's perceptibly below her 57% chance on Sept. 27, which reflected poll results after the Sept. 10 debate. "Since then," Silver writes, "the race has slightly drifted away from her."

Slightly but perceptibly. Silver's model gives reduced weight to polls conducted as long as six weeks ago. Another way of looking at the trend is to take a raw average of all polls conducted over a month. That method shows Harris leading Trump nationally by 3.6% in September and 1.7% in October.

The RealClearPolitics average, which includes only polls conducted starting Oct. 9, puts Harris' lead lower, at 0.8%. A Harris popular vote plurality of less than 2%, Silver estimates, has only a 16% chance of producing a Harris electoral vote majority.

Poll averages in this year's seven target states show something similar. September polling had Harris ahead in four of the seven states. October polling showed her leading in one, with Trump ahead in four and tied in two. The 34 target-state polls listed by RCP conducted primarily or totally since Oct. 9 show Trump ahead in all seven states, by an average of........

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