Latest public polling shows Kamala Harris — yes, her — to be more popular with voters than a free massage, water in the desert, and even group sex at P. Diddy’s house. Which is why it remains confounding that she’s clamoring for yet another debate with Donald Trump.

The only reasonable explanation is that her campaign managers have told her she’s on track to lose, probably decisively.

CNN on Saturday announced that the vice president accepted a second debate proposed by the channel for late next month. Kamala “is ready for another opportunity to share a stage with Donald Trump,” campaign chair Jen O’Malley Dillon said in a statement. “Donald Trump should have no problem agreeing to this debate.”

The channel’s reliable propagandist Brian Stelter then crawled into the daylight to antagonize Trump on behalf of the Kamala campaign, writing that it would be unbecoming for the election’s final debate to be between the two candidates’ running-mates, J.D. Vance and Tim “Stolen Valor” Walz. “[I]t sure would seem anticlimactic,” wrote Stelter, “to have Walz and Vance helm the last debate of the cycle.”

Duh-hurrrrr.

Kamala and her handlers have been crying out for a debate less than an hour after the first one two weeks ago was even over. Recall that debate as the one where, according to all of her friends in the national news media, Kamala flew past expectations, provoked Trump into a foaming drool, and deftly parried all incoming fire with surgical precision. After weeks of adulation from the press, the result is effectively no change in public polling. The race was a dead heat before, and it’s a dead heat now, though Trump maintains an advantage in the swing-state races, according to the RealClearPolitics polling average.

Polls are useful, but in the age of Trump, they only go so far — and it’s not that far. More important are the specific issues, events, and circumstances that change the campaign’s course and bring attention to the candidates’ strengths and weaknesses. If you remove the ongoing lawfare against Trump brought by the Kamala-Biden administration and local Democrat governments along the East Coast, everything else has gone in Trump’s direction.

The president has survived another Democrat-inspired assassination attempt. High prices brought by Kamala and the president have stuck. (The New York Times: “Prices remain sharply elevated compared with their prepandemic levels, and many families are still struggling to adjust.”) Job numbers are getting weaker and recession fears are growing stronger.

The southern border remains a wreck, and communities continue to see their public resources drained by the flood of migrants dumped on them by Kamala’s administration. Illegal border crossings were up by more than 3,000 in August, the most recent month on record. The reliably Democrat Teamsters worker union declined to endorse either candidate because its members, by its own public polling, preferred Trump to Kamala by a hilarious margin.

I’m not done. High-profile billionaires who previously supported Democrats have been lining up behind Trump, and they’re doing it publicly, which would have been unfathomable before this year. All levels of crime remain higher than before Democrats hyped up Covid, lockdowns, and BLM rioting in the 2020 election year. The Middle East continues to collapse, and low-income American minorities are watching billions move with haste to Ukraine while their own finances deteriorate, with no answer for the discord.

It’s not so much that the polls are fake, but they’re off. The media know that they’re wrong, while refusing to acknowledge even the possibility. They publish the results with fanfare and then explain that it’s because Kamala is “reintroducing” herself (another way of saying, “We in the media are permitting the vice president to abandon every unpopular position she held up until now because it benefits her campaign.”)

If Kamala were in fact running away with this race, with every poll showing she is the preferred candidate and with a stellar debate under her belt, there would be absolutely no incentive for her to seek another one. With all the help she got from the Democrat ABC moderators at the first debate, she would naturally feel comfortable assuming she’d get the same at a second one with CNN, but there would be no need for it. After all, we’re told she’s on track to win.

She’s not. She knows it.