Media chatter about how Hillary Clinton already has the election wrapped up was already fading before the new Washington Post/ABC News poll showing her favorability rating hitting an all-time low. Indeed, her favorable and unfavorable ratings among registered voters are now the same as widely reviled Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump. How do they compare in the smaller universe of likely voters? The poll doesn't say. Hint: She won't do better among likely voters.
Most polls, as I discussed 10 days ago, were already giving Clinton only a mid-single digits lead nationally, even as much of the media went on about the supposed impossibility of a Trump victory.
Well, just because something I've been warning about for more than a year should be impossible doesn't mean that it is.
Donald Trump pulled off a surprise visit to Mexico City, where he met and held a joint press conference with Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto.
It is too soon to predict that Trump will actually win the White House, but anyone who thinks he can't is whistling past the graveyard, or worse.
Trump maintained contact in the race even as he wasted weeks flailing in his own psychodrama, allowing an efficient but undynamic Clinton campaign to build real leads own a number of battleground states, spending massively while Trump spent next to nothing. But with Trump at least semi-functional after his latest campaign shake-up, some of those key state leads are sliding.
And now, with Hillary hurt by the sort of Clinton Foundation controversy I warned about, Trump is showing some big play capability internationally with a sudden successful strike south of the border.
Trump essentially punked Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto with his his sudden acceptance of the president's de rigueur invitation of the two major party nominees to visit Mexico City.
Trump was careful to speak respectfully during his striking joint press conference with a man who had previously compared him to Hitler and Mussolini, giving Trump just the sort of presidential-style event on the world stage he has so desperately needed.
While Trump and Pena Nieto obviously differ on Trump's ludicrous border wall proposal, Trump did get the Mexican president to agree to discuss ways to "modernize" the controversial NAFTA trade agreement.
Trump is clearly in position to make a play for the Latino vote, which in any event would hurt him with his own core supporters. But the visuals of what looked much like a state visit to Mexico City constitute a tremendous coup for Trump. And he can talk up his NAFTA "agreement" as he goes forward.
Hillary's response -- that Trump "can't make up for a year of insults by dropping in for a few hours" -- simply misses the point.
Trump isn't trying to make up for anything. He's trying to make his crazy-quilt aggressively know-nothing approach seem coherent and presidential.
He just got a real boost on that course, thanks to his own chutzpah and a huge unforced error by the president of Mexico, who granted him legitimacy he should never have been accorded. After all, there was never any need to invite Hillary to visit before the election.
And the one or two very conceivable bad things that could occur -- more economic trouble, terrorist spectacular, geopolitical humiliation, more revelations from Russian intelligence -- that would likely up-end what should be a Hillary victory, which I discussed nearly a month ago, have not yet occurred.
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