The Democratic ticket of Vice President Kamala Harris and Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz should be cruising toward an easy victory over former President Donald Trump and Sen. JD Vance (R-OH), according to the Democrat-aligned media, but the race is essentially tied with little more than a week to go until Election Day.

That unanticipated reality was acknowledged by Walz on Friday during a small campaign event in Scranton, Pennsylvania, in which he attempted to rally Democratic supporters to boost voter turnout, The Guardian reported.

Walz, harkening back to his history as a high school football assistant coach, delivered a sort of pep talk to encourage his ticket's supporters to keep pressing on until the electoral fight was finished.

Friday night football references at a political rally

On Friday night, former coach Walz referenced the dozens of high school football games that were ongoing around Pennsylvania at that moment and used the sport as an analogy for the final stretch of the election while addressing the few hundred supporters who showed up for the rally at the Scranton Cultural Center.

"It’s going to be tight. It’s the fourth quarter. We have got the best team on the field. We got the ball driving down on the last drive to win this thing," Walz said near the end of his speech, according to The Scranton Times-Tribune.

"We have got to do this one inch at a time, one yard at a time, one door at a time, one call at a time, one dollar at a time, one vote at a time," he added.

Trump is winning in the polls

Gov. Walz was not wrong to express concern about how "tight" the election is as Election Day draws near, per the polls, especially in light of how former President Trump had been substantially trailing his prior Democratic opponents at this same point in the past two elections.

According to RealClearPolling's average of national polls, the race is essentially tied as Trump currently has a 0.1-point lead over VP Harris, a lead he just attained in recent days after Harris held as much as a two-point advantage since early August.

That is a stark change from the two previous elections, when at the same point in late October President Joe Biden enjoyed a 7.4-point lead in 2020 and failed Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton had a 5.6-point lead in 2016 -- with the pollsters in both of those election cycles grossly underestimating the final level of support that ultimately turned out for Trump by Election Day.

As for Pennsylvania, the RCP average shows Trump with a 0.6-point lead over Harris, which again differs sharply from the same point in 2020 and 2016, when Biden led by 3.8 points and Clinton was ahead by 5 points, respectively.

Making the situation even more surprisingly distressing for the Democratic ticket of Harris and Walz is the fact that RCP also has Trump listed with marginal leads in the other six critically important battleground states -- Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, and Wisconsin -- where modern elections are typically decided.

Walz's dishonest attacks on Trump, praise for outgoing Biden

Aside from the football-themed pep talk portions of his speech, Gov. Walz largely dropped his faux "joyful warrior" persona to instead launch concerted but fraudulent attacks against former President Trump, according to The Guardian, replete with the now ubiquitous claims that the Republican nominee is some sort of Hitleresque fascist hell-bent on destroying the Constitution and democracy and governing as an authoritarian dictator.

That and other anti-Trump assertions were based on unproven allegations from some of his disgruntled former advisers-turned-critics, prior comments from the former president that were deliberately taken out of context, and outright lies about his purported intentions that Trump himself has repeatedly and insistently repudiated.

It wasn't all doom and gloom for Walz, though, as the Times-Tribune noted that he made it a point to highlight Scranton's connections to President Biden, who was initially the Democratic nominee until he was unceremoniously pushed aside by his own party following a disastrous debate performance in June that led to the elderly incumbent falling several points behind his GOP predecessor in the polls.