In important Florida, Joe Biden has taken a small shot at public opinion and now has a narrow lead.
In equally important Pennsylvania, Biden has pulled away from Trump, and even in Georgia, which has not voted for a Democratic presidential candidate since Bill Clinton in 1992, it is now even.
So it is a serious situation now for Trump and Pence.
Last week, the United States saw a screaming party for debate between a person that some Americans describe as an abusive bully and a person that other Americans do not even expect to be able to finish their sentences.
Americans expect this debate to be different.
On one side stands a deeply religious man, soft in tone, who almost never steps on the piano even during tough press conferences.
Opposite him will be one of Congress' toughest interrogators, former prosecutor Kamala Harris.
Wants to demoralize left-wing voters
Pence now needs to do everything to strike a much rougher wedge in the Democratic Party than President Trump has managed so far.
The Trump campaign has long sought to demoralize the more left-wing voters in the Democratic Party.
In an election where a large majority of the American people already know who they want to vote for, a lot is about how many ballot papers will eventually come in - or not come in.
Then the strategy becomes easy to try to split the opponent.
"You just lost the left," President Trump said after Joe Biden declared that he was not behind the climate initiative "The green new deal" during the debate last week.
This and other similar comments, however, hardly had any effect, in view of the opinion polls that have come since then.
But Pence has something that Trump does not have, a debate opponent who curses many left-wing voters.
Although Kamala Harris is one of the most progressive Democrats ever given the chance to run for vice president, she, like Biden, is a clear center-right Democrat, and far from everyone appreciates her election.
As a former California Attorney General and prosecutor, she rarely prosecuted police officers who killed civilians.
She has said she is against the death penalty but at the same time appealed when a court in California ruled that the death penalty violated the constitution.
Mike Pence will want to focus on this in the debate.
Here, Kamala Harris will also have to prove his loyalty to Biden, after running against him in the primary election.
"Pence that must step forward"
Kamala Harris is likely to focus a lot on the coronavirus.
Pence is the one who led President Trump's coronavirus group, and given that 210,000 Americans have died and the White House itself has suffered a serious outbreak, Harris is expected to demand an answer from Pence.
With a Donald Trump isolated inside the White House for some time to come, it is now Pence who must step forward and try to turn public opinion around.
Last winter, with a booming economy, the situation was different.
Trump could never then have imagined that Mike Pence would be one of his last hopes in the election campaign.
But so it has now become.