To judge by that, you’d never know that she out-raised Buttigieg by $5 million in the first quarter of the year or that her second CNN town hall had the most viewership among a sequence of five consecutive CNN town halls — the other four showcased Buttigieg, Warren, Sanders and Amy Klobuchar — on the same night.

You wouldn’t know that in a Morning Consult poll published on Monday, her support from 7 percent of Democratic voters nationwide put her one percentage point above Buttigieg and two above O’Rourke. (She trailed the third-place finisher, Warren, by one point; Joe Biden had the lead with 40 and Sanders was second with 19.) In a Harvard-Harris poll published on Friday, Harris took third place, trailing only Biden and Sanders.

Her campaign, then, is a test not only of her mettle but of our biases and receptiveness. In terms of the latter, much of the “electability” chatter of the last few weeks pivots explicitly or implicitly on the assumption that she and Warren would be at a disadvantage in the Rust Belt because white male voters would be less open to them than to Biden or Sanders. She addressed that head-on in a series of appearances in the Midwest over recent days, noting that there are plenty of minority voters in Midwestern cities.

One of her supporters, Bakari Sellers, a former South Carolina state representative, reminded Politico: “The only Democratic candidate to win the presidency in the last two decades was a black guy.” Sellers also said that “we’ve allowed ‘working class’ to enter our lexicon and only mean white working class — and totally disregard a whole other swath of voters.” In the 2016 election, he added, “What we saw in Milwaukee, in Detroit and Philadelphia — we lost the presidency where we probably could have focused on those working-class voters of color just a little bit more.”

Be that as it may, Harris has important adjustments to make. She should take firmer positions, even at the risk of angering some voters. It signals character and strength, and sometimes the best way to win is to be willing to lose.

She also needs to find better ways to draw on her life story and let voters in. One of the keys to Buttigieg’s surprising emergence as a top-tier candidate is how lavishly he doles out so much of himself: his military service, his marriage to another man, his linguistic dexterity, his Christianity, his Midwestern roots and more. It allows voters many different points of connection and establishes him as more multi-dimensionally human than politicians usually seem to be.

But there’s little to no sign that Buttigieg has made a meaningful connection with black voters, who play a profoundly important part in the Democratic Party and whose turnout in a general election could be the difference between an end to Donald Trump’s presidency or four more years. That’s Buttigieg’s great challenge, one complicated by complaints that he was insufficiently sensitive to people of color as mayor of South Bend, Ind.