Two months remain until election day and many things can change, but people’s opinions of Trump have remained static for a long time. After his four years in the White House and four more remaining in the public eye since, voters still largely carry the same views about Trump they did before. They knew Biden about as well. It is only Harris who remains a mystery — largely at the insistence of her own campaign.

Her public statements in the coming months — especially at tomorrow’s debate in Philadelphia — will dispel the glamour she and her campaign have created of being all things to all people. The Vice President has been on both sides of many of the issues that matter to the electorate.

Immigration is a perfect example. As a senator from California, Harris voted against funding Trump’s border wall. In her brief 2020 campaign for president, she said she would decriminalise illegal entry into the United States and suggested abolishing ICE. Biden appointed her as his point person on the border, and the numbers of illegal migrants reached the millions, the most ever recorded. Now? Harris runs commercials calling herself a tough border-state prosecutor and even including shots of the border wall she once opposed. Does she still oppose it? She has not made that clear, but will surely have to pick a side before November.

Other flip-flopping incidents dog the campaign. Harris supported universal Government healthcare, including a ban on private health insurance in 2019, before walking that back. What are her plans for healthcare now? No one knows.

A ban on fracking? Like John Kerry, she was for it before she was against it — that is to say, before she realised she needed to win frack-happy Pennsylvania to get to the Oval Office. Biden’s own plan to require car companies to build just electric or hydrogen vehicles by 2035? She’s against that now, too.

The NYT poll notes that 54% blame the Biden-Harris administration for inflation. Harris says she’ll put a stop to it, but other than an unformed policy suggestion about price controls, she has no idea how and no explanation for why she and Biden have not done it already.

These contradictions and reversals have begun to define Harris to the American people as someone who will say whatever she must to be elected. She has two months to figure out how to look like someone who stands for something — and hope that the public agrees with her.