I have this sneaking suspicion and instinct that Kamala Harris will be nicknamed the “Giant Killer” before this is all over.

She had Donald Trump for dinner during the debate; she is steady, one step at a time, gaining ground in what the older adults’ news organizations insist is a race too close to call.

I am the odd man out. If you can step back for a bit, as I do, it’s easy to call. And I pay little attention to polls, which were created for another time.

Harris also will, I think, drive a nail in the old media’s obsession with their unreliable and useless polling rather than gettting off their butts and leaving their laptops behind and going out and talking to people with people.

It was clear to me on the first day when she came roaring out to take over the Democratic Party.

Ever since Harris came roaring out of the gate after the demise of her boss,  the so-called “mainstream” media has been pouting and complaining that she doesn’t answer questions, hasn’t developed or explained her policies, and that Donald Trump could easily defeat her with his historical bungled and absurdly outdated campaign.

It’s close, they keep telling us, unbelievably close, be frightened and listen carefully.

At first, it seemed the whole measure of Harris was her willingness to “sit down with a serious anchor.” I’d rather sit on an ant hill with honey on my ass. Nobody is saying that now.

There are hardly any Trump signs in my rural conservative town this year; that is the most telling poll I know of.

The thought of JD Vance taking over the presidency is almost enough to win her campaign; what a gift he is to her and the women’s revolution forming behind her. Vance is sufficient alone to wreck the Trump campaign; he is a political assassin in his way. Speaking of gifts, the cat thing made me wonder if he wasn’t on Kamala’s side. The dog and cat mystery in Ohio is even better.

The old media is disgracing itself by whining and complaining about Harris – they are becoming the Trumps of journalism. Mommy, mommy, Kamala won’t sit down and play with me. Journalists are no longer permitted to think, only to poll and do the left-right dance.

The public isn’t complaining about her lack of extensive interviews; they stopped paying attention to these stiff and boring sit-downs years ago. She is campaigning without bowing to them and their polls, and they are mad about it, accusing her of being frightened and unprepared. To win a political campaign, people have to like you. She is very likable.

I think they are living in a different universe than I am, along with half of the country and a robust number of powerful women who finally smell the blood of the dug-in white men who have been harassing and dominating,  ignoring them, and assaulting them for centuries.

I get it. It isn’t just a saying; they are not going back. They are building a firewall all over the country that seems apparent to me but not to the fossilized old men who run the television networks and are fighting to stay “mainstream,” a joke to every American under 35.  

In this age, few younger people have ever even watched the news on TV, and the number is shrinks all the time. Soon enough, most of their audience, like me, will be gone, and so will they.

Like Mr. Trump himself, the dying institutions we used to call “mainstream media” have finally and openly given up the ghost, humiliated and outflanked by 59-year-old black women who will soon be our next President, or so I believe.

No, she’s not giving a lot of interviews in some studio and fake living room that nobody cares about. She’s out winning a campaign and talking to humans.

Long live the media. The media is dead. (I should say I worked for the New York Times, The Washington Post, CBS News, the Boston Globe, Wired Magazine, and Rolling Stone. I was a political reporter for several years and loved every minute of it, as I love my blog now. I take no joy in their demise.)

Of all these, the New York Times surprises me by being the most in touch with the new world of communications. They have changed.  Once the stuffiest, they are now the most relevant of the Old Guard. However, they are not yet nearly as relevant as TikTok or Instagram.

Harris is brave and savvy no matter what her alleged fallacies – they haven’t shown up yet to me –  are supposed to be. She is tough as nails.

I watched her sit down with Oprah Winfrey this morning (the meeting was last night)  and thought, wow, these two women know how to get voters excited and pay attention to them, a far more critical thing for Harris to do now than sitting down and pretending to argue with another old and grim fart on TV news.

(One thing I have noticed about Harris is that she is great if she likes the person interviewing her. If she doesn’t, she stiffs up. She and Winfredy were like sorority sisters last night. Both were at the top of their game.

“I don’t want to sit and watch the details of her policies,” a young friend told me the other night, “I just want to know if she will take care of the border and lower prices. That’s all my friends, and I need to know, not how tough a TV anchor is. They don’t talk my language.”

Karris is demonstrating that they don’t talk anybody’s language who is not running to the pharmacy every other day for their medications (I know, I am one of those.)

Karris is bypassing conventional media, spending her money on social media and new forms of communication, such as local radio and civic clubs. Donald Trump, who still loves network television, scoffs at TikTok if he even knows about it.

Harris knows better. She radiates joy and hope; you can see it if you watch women watching her. They can hardly believe their good fortune. For a politician, that is the most precious thing.

Harris is breaking conventional wisdom, long-lasting truths, and convention. Donald Trump has become the older, nasty man with his finger in his dike, which won’t work for him anymore.  

He is way past his time. I don’t believe the race is so amazingly tight; the polls have been surprisingly inaccurate for years.

Polls are not made for virtual polling; they don’t work in the digital age. AI might well do a better job. The software knows people better these days than pollsters on the other end of a computer.

Trump has many loyal followers and is loved by almost half the country; I don’t underestimate him.

However, there is only one big story in this campaign: women.

Trump is running the sourest, most depressing, incompetent, and self-defeating campaign in American political history. If you aren’t too close to it or engaged in it, it’s pretty obvious.

Trump is no longer a radical revolutionary who will arouse and change us. I can’t imagine a powerful or exciting thing he’s said for months. His cranky, nasty, whining speeches are not only incomprehensible but profoundly stupid.

Instead of beating Joe Biden, he models him in a more vicious and more arrogant form. It won’t work for him either. Trump will die thinking he is a big star who never lost.

The mainstream media still mostly misses the genuine revolution by aroused and committed women and millions of the young, all of whom are sick of how the mainstream media sees the world, have no interest in the offerings of pundits, and have created their own kind of media and campaign, which Harriss seems to understand and Trump never will.

Count on the “mainstream media” to miss it and the polls to be unable to grasp or reflect it. From the beginning, this was a campaign about women, and it continues to be that more and more every day.

Nothing on Mr. Trump’s side is as committed, organized, and articulate about its goals as Harris and her followers are.

If you doubt me, which is okay by me, watch the Winfrey-Harris show of Thursday night – it is being replayed all over the internet and look for the part when a grieving mother and sister of Amber Thurman of Georgia spoke to Winfrey and Harris for the first time about her tragic death by sepsis after waiting 20 hours, for a hospital to treat her complications from an abortion pill, an undisputed outcome of restrictions by the state’s abortion laws.

“Amber was not a statistic,” her mother said as the crowd, including Winfrey and Harris (and me),  teared up en masse.

“She was loved by a family, a strong family, and we would have done whatever to get my baby, our baby, the help that she needed.”

Winfrey is a master of arousing people’s emotions, and Harris has never seemed more comfortable; the two ought to go on the road.

Contrast this with a two-hour interview with George Stephanopoulos demanding to know why she changed her mind about something six years ago or Donald Trump babbling on about Hannibal Lecter.

This is the stuff that touches people’s hearts and wins elections. It’s impossible to think of a single moment in the desperate and disintegrating Trump to match it, not even a frightening assassination attempt that no one even remembers a few days later.