Since getting the ticket from the hands of Joe Biden, Kamala Harris has been hard at work to define Donald Trump – and his entourage – as extremist.

“Donald Trump has picked his new running mate: J.D. Vance. Trump looked for someone he knew would be a rubber stamp for his extreme agenda,” she said a few days after Trump picked his VP candidate.

At the Democratic National Convention, they also framed Trump as an extremist, bringing moderate Republicans to the stage to denounce the 45th President.

Meanwhile, Donald Trump is going at Harris with all the class and fury he can muster since she became the presumptive democratic nominee. “She is a radical left lunatic who will destroy our country if she ever gets the chance to get into office,” Trump said in July at a campaign rally in Charlotte, North Carolina.

Extreme. Radical. These words carry significant weight. Is that really the choice Americans must make?

You are extreme when your positions or actions deviate significantly from what is considered mainstream or moderate. It is not just different, but dangerously out of step with societal norms.

You are a radical when you propose fundamental and immediate change to societal, cultural, and political structures and systems. It is not only breaking from the status quo, but doing so in an abrupt, risky way, endangering social order in the process.

For the longest time, America’s political culture preferred gradualism and pragmatism. The country’s political system is designed to promote compromise and incremental change. The checks and balances that are in place make it difficult to move forward with an extreme or a radical agenda. Or so it used to be.

So here we are today.  Over 40% of the population are staunch Donald Trump supporters and not only reject the “extreme” label but are offended by it.  And over 40% of American voters are quite supportive of Kamala Harris’ agenda and do not see any radicalism in it, far from it in fact.

So why are these terms being used so much? Delegitimizing the opposition is the obvious answer, but since most voters don’t buy it, why use it at all? Because of the swing voters still at play, an ever-shrinking pool of the electorate, maybe around 10%. And especially the swing voters in the swing states of Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. These states amount to 30 million actual voters, most of them spoken for and not swinging. Leaving around 3 million votes up for grabs.

This group of elusive voters in these battleground states are the key to deciding the outcome of the upcoming presidential election. The political polarization, characterized by a more divided electorate with fewer voters in the middle, has been caused in part by the increase of over-the-top rhetoric as the basic lines of attacks along with record amounts of money spent on attack ads.

Instead of turning down the heat and putting forward a more measured tone to the political discourse, Republicans have doubled down and Democrats are all in. Both parties are engaged in an arms race to further divide and polarize the electorate, to crystallize the swing vote in their favour. That’s all that matters and, sadly, while both candidates are calling for unity, it ain’t coming anytime soon.