The night before the first showdown between trump and harris, the latest national poll of New York Times and Sienna College confirmed that not only is the sugar of the brat summer over, but Harris has failed to designate himself as a moderate.

Much has been made of the conclusion that Trump, who has trailed Harris in national polls for most of the past month, is actually 1 point ahead of her among likely voters. But what’s more intriguing is why the tide is turning back in Trump’s favor.

The former president has focused on Harris’ record as the most liberal member of the Senate and has tied her to Joe Biden’s presidency. Trump has thereby succeeded in reminding voters that he, not Harris, is the moderate of choice and that Harris would simply prolong and exacerbate the doctrine of her waning boss.

The New York Times asked voters about specific policy areas and which candidate would perform better in that arena, but just as importantly, the poll asked whether respondents think Trump is too conservative or Harris too progressive.

Less than a third of likely voters polled said Trump is too conservative, while another 10% said he is not conservative enough. Nearly half said Trump “isn’t too far in any way.” Compare that to the 47% of respondents who said Harris is too progressive, with just 41% reporting she’s not too far either way. The data becomes more difficult for Harris when broken down by demographics.

For example, more Hispanics reported that Harris is too progressive (39%) than those who said Trump is too conservative (32%). In any case, Harris is seen as more extreme than Trump by every age demographic except for voters younger than 30.

The voters are right. By any objective measure, it’s Harris who deviates from mainstream media opinion, not Trump. To use the issue that still favors Democrats, consider the example of abortion.

Both as senator and vice president, Harris has championed legislation that would federally codify legal abortion up until birth – barely 1 in 5 voters support protecting abortion access in the third trimester, with 70% saying late-term abortion should be legal.

Trump has completely taken abortion off the table as a federal issue, drawing friendly fire from social conservatives thanks to his promise to directly veto any federal bill restricting abortion at all. He has criticized Florida’s six-week ban, which is opposed by 59% of voters polled by Gallup, but he also announced his opposition to the Sunshine State’s Amendment 4, which would legalize these highly unpopular abortions of late. One gets the sense that Trump agrees with the median public opinion that Democrats once claimed to support: that abortion, far from being a positive thing, should be safe, time-limited and rare when legalized at the state level.

Likewise, voters aren’t buying Harris’ attempts to distance himself from Biden’s failures. The majority of likely voters polled by New York Times said they believe Harris should at least get some blame for rising prices, the border crisis and the disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan.

And it’s not just these big events that voters loathe. Virtually all voters said the next president should represent an overall big change from Biden, with just 3% saying he or she should represent no change. And like him or not, the majority of voters reported that Trump represents a big change from the status quo and that Harris represents “more of the same.”

On the issues that matter, Trump still has the lead. In a new Pew Research Center poll showing the pair tied nationally, voters still ranked the economy as the single most important issue in the election, the issue where voters still give Trump a double-digit margin over Harris. Harris has only one edge over Trump on two non-policy issues — “effectively addressing issues around race” and “bringing (the) country closer together” — and abortion and health care, the latter of which she leads with only 2 point margin.

Why don’t voters trust Harris’ attempts to pivot away from her administration’s failed policies? Because for every silent denial or attempt to get away from his past via unnamed campaign staffer or unsigned press release, another Harris ally lets the mask slip. Consider socialist Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT), who partnered with Harris in the Senate to push to nationalize the health care system and the energy industry with their co-sponsorship of “Medicare for All” and the Green New Deal. When asked about Harris’ apparent 180, Sanders promised she was sticking to her progressive agenda.

“I think she’s trying to be pragmatic and do what she thinks is right to win the election,” he said.

And this is how to understand Harris’ promise that her values ​​have not changed: Her desire and eagerness to gain power has never wavered.

Nowhere is this clearer than her policy proposals on her website. Despite running for president once before, Harris couldn’t just steal from her previous repertoire of proclamations to end private health insurance and fracking. Instead, she had to construct a series of word salads to pretend she supports Trump’s tax cuts, Trump’s border wall, and basically everything but Trump himself. But even then she betrays her true intentions. After a long rant that Trump was responsible for killing a border deal that would have forced law enforcement to take in 5,000 illegal immigrants per day, Harris admits her real intention is to put the more than 10 million illegal immigrants her administration has released into the country on “an earned path to citizenship.”

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The voters don’t hatred the scripted and rebooted Harris shined and snarked over in the media, but they don’t confidence her. And with a renewed focus on what Harris has done rather than who she is, Trump could cement the emerging understanding that Harris is anything but a change agent from the status quo and cipher of the middle.

During Tuesday’s debate, he simply needs to expose Harris’ allegations for what they are: admissions of guilt. She is truly the extreme candidate, and she is the one who will double down on the disastrous policies of the last four years. Trump doesn’t even need to “Make America Great Again” then, but simply promise to undo the damage done by the Biden and, yes, the Harris administration.