For several months, Joe Biden has been running an election campaign out of his basement - successfully.

Of course, this is a far lower profile than most politicians keep while running for any public office, let alone the president of the United States of America.

It may not entirely be a strategy. Perhaps he is listening to public health warnings, staying home and avoiding crowds.

Or maybe it’s the most effective tactic the Biden camp have found so far.

From his home, the presumptive Democratic candidate has been involved in campaign videos, media interviews and a hefty number of Tweets.

And it’s in the Tweets where Biden finds his headlines.

On Twitter, Biden wrote: “On July 1st, Donald Trump predicted the coronavirus was going to ‘just disappear.’

“He was wrong — and more than 25,000 Americans died due to the virus last month.

“Mr. President, step up and do your job before even more American families feel the pain of losing a loved one.”

In this case, timing was key. The Tweet came the morning after the president “visibly floundered” in a television interview on HBO by Axios’s national political correspondent, Jonathan Swan.

According to The Guardian newspaper, Trump was “pressed on a range of issues, including the number of coronavirus cases and deaths in the US, his claims that mail-in voting is fraudulent, and his inaction over the ‘Russian bounty’ scandal.”

It was a damaging interview for the Trump administration, and demonstrated that the president is his own greatest political liability - and Biden’s largest advantage.

As Biden holds small, remote events, Trump is left to answer huge questions amid a pandemic and subsequent economic crash.

And it’s working. The Financial Times shows how the latest state-by-state polling data would translate into electoral college votes.

With 270 electoral college votes needed to win, the FT puts Biden at 308 to Trump at only 128.

And, according to FiveThirtyEight’s national polling average, the Democratic candidate has hovered between a lead of 7.6% to 9.6% since the beginning of July.

At least for the moment, it doesn’t hurt to stay out of the media spotlight - it already worked in the U.K.

Boris Johnson, the prime minister, did not appear on any of the pre-election debate programmes before last December’s general election, sending a minister instead.

Then, he refused to attend a programme for party leaders, which highlighted his absence with an empty chair.

Seen by many as a bumbling figure and his party’s biggest liability, he stayed safe and achieved a landslide victory.

Trump’s political advisers and campaign strategists may wish that they could hide away their bumbling figure, too.

But you can’t run a country from a basement.