Despite its alleged concern for the decline of civility in politics, the New York Times is actually all in on political slander and name-calling lately -- when it’s in the service of defeating Donald Trump. For the second time in under two weeks, the paper reveled in the party’s new tactic of throwing the dirty word “fascist” at Trump to see if it would stick (not that they didn’t do so before but now they’ve turned it up to 11).

The Times thinks the plan is working for Kamala Harris – or at least, the Times now considers it politically expedient to claim it’s working for Harris, under the headline “Harris Aides Hopeful That Casting Trump as a Fascist Could Shift Election.”

Reporters Reid J. Epstein, Lisa Lerer, and Maggie Haberman led with a lead that will sound either prescient or preposterous in a week (or more?):

As the presidential contest enters the final sprint, campaign aides and allies close to Vice President Kamala Harris are growing cautiously optimistic about her chances of victory, saying the race is shifting in her favor.

Top Democratic strategists are increasingly hopeful that the campaign’s attempts to cast former President Donald J. Trump as a fascist -- paired with an expansive battleground-state operation and strength among female voters still energized by the end of federal abortion rights -- will carry Ms. Harris to a narrow triumph. Even some close to Mr. Trump worry that the push to label him a budding dictator who has praised Hitler could move small but potentially meaningful numbers of persuadable voters.

Officials within the Harris campaign and people with whom they have shared candid assessments believe she remains in a solid position in the Northern “blue wall” states of Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, saying internal polling shows her slightly ahead in all three -- though by as little as half a percentage point.

….

Ms. Harris’s aides believe the argument tying Mr. Trump to fascism is helping her sway moderate Republicans, even though the leading super PAC supporting her bid has raised worries that it is not Democrats’ most effective message. Democratic officials emphasize that they have won -- or overperformed -- in a wide range of contests since 2016 by painting the former president as divisive.

The Times tried to recapture some of that famous Harris campaign "joy."

For all his bravado in public, Mr. Trump is privately cranky and stressed, according to three people in contact with him, with a schedule marked by chronic lateness. Ms. Harris, aides say, is energized by her crowds, particularly the 30,000 supporters who watched her discuss abortion rights at a rally featuring Beyoncé on Friday in Houston.

But not Beyonce actually performing, which angered many in attendance.

Some of the reasons for Democratic optimism the Times pushed sounded awfully thin.

In Michigan, union organizers have found a sunnier outlook for Ms. Harris than they expected when surveying their members. An internal United Auto Workers poll of the union’s members in battleground states found Ms. Harris with a five-point lead among white voters without a college degree, and a 13-point advantage among men without a college degree -- striking results among types of voters she is not expected to win broadly.

The Times let Democratic strategists explain away troubling figures, unconvincingly.

While some party strategists are worried about the early-voting numbers in Nevada and Georgia, top officials in the Harris campaign say those figures are not as significant as they might seem.

Their vote models suggest that Mr. Trump has successfully pushed many of his supporters to vote earlier, effectively cannibalizing the strong turnout he has usually garnered on Election Day.

Eventually the reporters got around to briefly note continuing Democratic uneasiness.

And Democrats, even at the top levels of the Harris campaign, worry that the party is not correctly modeling the electorate in its polling, repeating a misstep that led Mr. Biden’s campaign aides to overestimate his strength in the final days of the 2020 race.