At a town hall event this week, Kamala Harris was asked a simple question that highlighted why she has difficulty winning over undecided voters: “What weaknesses do you bring to the table?”

Joe Donahue, a retail worker, asked the presidential candidate the fateful question at Wednesday's CNN event, adding: “So how do you plan to overcome this?”

Ms Harris, who will be the most powerful person in the world if she wins the presidential election in just over a week, faltered before admitting she was having difficulty answering questions or thinking on her feet.

“Some might call that a weakness, especially when you're in an interview or asked a certain question and you're expected to have the right answer straight away,” she said, switching indecisively between her questioner and CNN -Host Anderson Cooper back and forth. “But that’s how I work.”

Critics say Ms. Harris's inability to “understand the right answer right away” is why the vice president's campaign appears to have gone so wrong this week.

As polls tighten ahead of Election Day, Ms. Harris, long criticized for her “word salad” answers, is struggling to find an answer to win back voters who are turning to Donald Trump.

Commentators claim her campaign has become desperate in the last week, looking for eleventh-hour giveaways while simultaneously throwing haymakers at her Republican opponent in the hope of moving the needle.

Recent polls show the race is still close, but the Democrat is falling behind in battleground states that will decide the election.

A recent policy announcement to double the federal minimum wage was heavily distorted and flew under the radar while campaign officials broke cover to warn that key states were slipping away.

At the same time, Ms. Harris has begun to distance herself from Joe Biden, as she previously supported his political positions and was close to the man who dropped out of the presidential race to support her.

Since becoming the Democratic nominee this summer, Ms. Harris has spent much of her time treating Trump as a supporting actor and rising above the fray.

This week she called her opponent a “fascist” and pointedly emphasized that he had been compared to Hitler.

“The campaign is in free fall and she is absolutely desperate and grasping at any straw she can get,” Charlie Gerow, a Republican strategist in the swing state of Pennsylvania, told The Telegraph.

“Somehow the belief that accusing Donald Trump of being a fascist is a compelling closing argument – ​​nothing could be further from the truth. They’re in real trouble and they know it.”

An anonymous Harris campaign official admitted to NBC News this week that the vice president could lose Michigan or Wisconsin, two battleground states that were crucial to the electoral victories of Joe Biden and Barack Obama.

They also suggested that North Carolina, which was at the top of Ms. Harris' target list, was “slipping away” as the race entered its final stages.

This week, a Telegraph poll showed Trump ahead in four of the seven swing states and tied in two others. Ms. Harris led in only one state and by a single point: Wisconsin.

With the White House seemingly slipping out of her control, the vice president has decided to change her tactics.

Earlier this month, she told ABC's The View that she “can't think of anything” when asked what she would have done differently than Mr. Biden.

Seemingly spooked by the Trump attack ads, which repeat the message endlessly and associate her with an unpopular president, she has taken a different course.

Separation from Biden

“Mine will not be a continuation of the Biden administration,” she told NBC News on Tuesday, saying she would separate from her former vice president's economic policies aimed at driving down food and housing prices.

That same evening, she supported plans to double the federal minimum wage to $15 an hour – not in her widely followed NBC News interview, but in a segment that aired afterwards.

As a result, it fell under the radar for most news outlets except The Telegraph and Bloomberg. NBC has not yet published its own article.

Mr. Gerow was harsh about the campaign's failure to publicize the announcement in the media.

“The message needs to be clear – you can't just hit it once and run away,” he said. “It needs to be brought home with prep work, and it needs to be repeated.”

Ms. Harris appeared to be trying to draw a contrast with Trump, who dodged a question about the minimum wage during a campaign stop at McDonald's on Sunday.

Standing at a drive-thru window in Feasterville, Pennsylvania, the Republican instead praised the “great staff” for their work.

Ms. Harris and her supporters have long used her claim to have worked at the fast-food chain to burnish her working-class reputation, while Trump has accused her of lying.

Neither could provide evidence, but the Republican won the headline war as he worked the fryer, handing out food to customers.

After being ahead in the polls for most of her race, the attrition of the campaign and months of political attacks appear to be catching up with Ms. Harris.

So much so that she can't even share her greatest weakness without falling victim to it.

Both Democrats and Republicans are struggling to find a strategy that will work against Trump, who has been a fixture on the political stage for nearly a decade. If she wants to walk through the doors of the Oval Office in January, Ms. Harris will have to find the answer soon.

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