Remember When They Said the Race Was Over?

“It’s so likely that Donald Trump will lose, my entrance into the race doesn’t affect that,” former CIA agent Evan McMullin said on ABC News’ “This Week” early in August after he announced his independent bid for the presidency.

Early August were the dog days of the 2016 contest for Donald Trump, and McMullin was not the only Establishment Republican eager to forecast a Trump landslide loss on Nov. 8 as the newly minted GOP nominee sagged in the polls. A myriad of GOP NeverTrumpers and pundits in the mainstream media rushed to declare Trump destined for defeat.

“The people of the United States are ready for change. They’re ready to discard a failed political Establishment that disdains, disrespects, and looks down on hardworking people.”

“Reality is reality,” South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham said on WABC Radio’s “Imus in the Morning” show in August. “So if we do lose — and the reason I think we’re going to lose is because the demographic meltdown that came from harsh rhetoric and policies by Mr. Trump, making every problem we had in 2012 worse.”

“I think … that we see the biggest landslide loss ever when whoever the Democratic nominee is beats Donald Trump,” radical Leftist filmmaker Michael Moore told Fox News host Megyn Kelly in May. “Believe me. Biggest landslide loss ever, Donald Trump.”

“And so ends the great populist uprising of our time, fizzling out pathetically in the mud and the bigotry stirred up by a third-rate would-be caudillo named Donald J. Trump,” opinion writer Thomas Frank wrote for The Guardian in mid-August. “Things will change between now and November, of course. But what seems most plausible from the current standpoint is a landslide for Clinton, and with it the triumph of complacent neoliberal orthodoxy.”

Events over the last several weeks have obliterated the predictions of certain doom from Trump naysayers, putting NeverTrump Republicans into a panic for their situation should Trump actually win and handing embarrassment to many in the punditry.

A CBS News Battleground Tracker Poll released Sunday on “Face the Nation” shows the race between Trump and Clinton is now tied, with 42 percent each across the key battleground states. Forty-seven percent of those polled believed Trump would bring change to Washington, D.C. By contrast, only 20 percent of those polled believed Clinton would bring change.

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The news comes on the heels of several indications Trump is surging in the 2016 contest.

The GOP nominee has taken a 5-point lead over Clinton in the hotly contested battleground state of Ohio, according to a Bloomberg Politics poll released this week. That’s a full 12-percent increase in Trump’s position from the previous week.

Even analysis from Nate Silver of FiveThirtyEight on Sunday showed Trump significantly narrowing the gap. FiveThirtyEight’s “polls-plus” predictor now puts Trump at a 40.3 percent chance of winning the presidential election.

Silver gave Trump a measly 20.5 percent shot on Aug. 8 when McMullin and a rush of other treason-happy Republicans were bailing on the GOP nominee.

Caught offguard by the appeal of Trump’s message catching fire and the GOP nominee’s ability to muster a disciplined campaign, the NeverTrumpers and elites in the media now have nothing to eat but crow. The same people who never saw the anti-Establishment and anti-globalization movements that have swept across the U.S. and Europe failed to see the signs that Trump would be propelled into serious contention.

“The people of the United States are ready for change. They’re ready to discard a failed political Establishment that disdains, disrespects, and looks down on hardworking people,” Trump said during a rally in Canton, Ohio, on Wednesday. “This election is about a choice between the control of an arrogant ruling class in Washington, D.C., versus the hopes and dreams of everyday citizens.”

We don’t know how this election is going to end in less than two months, but it certainly doesn’t look like it will be a landslide victory for Clinton.