Less than three weeks before the election, the presidential campaign of Democratic candidates Kamala Harris and Tim Walz is collapsing like wet tissue paper. The cause of this collapse is the late decision of the campaign to send the candidates on a round of legitimate media appearances, after having sheltered them from hard questions for most the campaign.

The first blow came in early October from 60 Minutes journalist Bill Whitaker. Harris skated through the first half of the interview with evasions and non-answers. Then she tried to answer Whitaker’s most pressing question, on the topic of immigration, by blaming former President Trump for not supporting the Biden administration’s border legislation. 

“He told his buddies in Congress, ‘Kill the bill, don’t let it move forward,” Harris complained.

To Harris’s dismay, Whitaker issued a polite rebuttal:

But there was a historic flood of undocumented immigrants coming across the border the first three years of your administration. As a matter of fact, arrivals quadrupled from the last year of President Trump. Was it a mistake to loosen the immigration policies as much as you did?

Whitaker continued to push the point, rejecting Harris’s platitudes about “offering solutions.” Even this light pushback appeared to fluster and anger Harris, who led the Biden administration’s border policy. 

The weakness Harris showed on immigration in the 60 Minutes interview was fully exploited by Fox News anchor Brett Baier on Oct. 16, in a combative interview that thoroughly embarrassed the Democrat nominee. Baier opened the interview by asking, “How many illegal immigrants would you estimate that your administration has released into the country over the last three-and-a-half years?” 

“Well, I’m glad you raised the topic of immigration because I agree with you, it is a topic of discussion that people want to rightly have,” began Harris’s bland non-answer. Baier pressed her on the number, citing an estimate of 6 million illegals released, and pressed on through her evasion:

When you came into office, your administration immediately reversed a number of Trump border policies. Most significantly, the policy that required illegal immigrants to be detained through deportation either in the U.S. or in Mexico. And you reversed that policy: they were released into the U.S. pending trial. Included in those were a large number of single men, adult men, who went on to commit heinous crimes. So, looking back, do you regret the decision to terminate ‘Remain in Mexico’ at the beginning of your administration?

Harris grew increasingly angry and defensive and appeared to nearly snap near the end, when Baier countered her claim that Trump would weaponize the Justice Department against Democrats by playing a clip of Trump pointing out that that was exactly what Democrats had done to him.

Never mind the polls, which are partisan and unreliable. People betting real money on the online predictions market Polymarket started to heavily favor Trump’s reelection after Harris’s October interviews. The gamblers had the race as a near toss-up since Biden was coerced into accepting Harris’s nomination on Aug. 5. Then bets for Trump began to pull away after the CBS interview on Oct. 7 and surged to a 20 percentage-point lead a day after the Baier interview.

America may yet have a chance. It will be crucial for a reelected President Trump to save this country by seizing a narrow window of opportunity to close the border, deport the illegals, and pass a federal voter identification law to prevent those who evade deportation from influencing our future elections—which has been the plan of the Democratic Party all along.