This election should be a cakewalk, but Hillary Clinton is in serious danger of losing to Donald Trump.

Although she still has about a 5 point edge in some national polls, the monster lead she had over Trump late in the summer has all but vanished.

The race is even tighter if you look at the state level, where Trump is now ahead of Clinton in key swing states like North Carolina, Florida, and Ohio.

He's also pulling away in Nevada, which voted for President Obama in both 2008 and 2012.

These are astounding developments.

Just a few months ago, after the Democratic Convention and Trump's attacks on the Khan family, it looked like Hillary Clinton was on the verge of the biggest electoral landslide since 1984, when Ronald Reagan obliterated Walter Mondale.

But now the race is tighter than it's ever been, and even though 538.com still gives Clinton a 58.8 percent chance of winning, there's a growing sense among many progressives -- myself included -- that Clinton's fortunes are sinking fast.

So... what the heck happened?

Well, first and foremost the media happened.

By focusing nonstop on pseudo-scandals involving the Clinton Foundation and almost completely ignoring real scandals involving the Donald J. Trump Foundation, Trump University, and other Trump business scandals, mainstream corporate media has created a false equivalency between the candidates, one that has led many voters to trust Hillary less and Donald Trump more than they should.

If you ask me, this was intentional: it helped create some drama in an election that was starting to look like a blowout, and drama produces better ratings and profits for the networks.

But intentional or not, Clinton's plummeting electoral chances aren't just the fault of the mainstream media.

They're also the fault of the Clinton campaign itself.

Instead of mobilizing the Democratic base, it's spent the past few months rehabilitating Bush-era neocons to try to talk other Republicans out of voting for Trump.

These people were completely discredited over a decade ago, but the Clinton campaign is now giving them new life with ads like this.

If the Clinton campaign thinks ads like that are going to put their candidate in the White House, then they deserve to lose.

That's because this election, like the 2008 election before it, is a change election -- it's a contest between insiders and outsiders.

So when Clinton shows off the support she has from people like Max Boot, all she does is confirm what people already suspect about her, that she's an insider who's way too close with the people who are selling this country down the river.

That's not to say, though, that Clinton shouldn't try to win over some Republican voters.

But what her campaign is doing right now is just insane, and it's made worse by the fact that she's not really giving people any clear and positive reasons to vote for her.

The main thrust of Clinton's pitch to Republicans, and really her campaign as a whole at this point, is that she's "not Trump."

Sure, we heard some stuff about "America is already great" at the convention, but really what Clinton has run on for the past few months is the idea that she's a responsible, qualified candidate who won't mess things up.

As logical as it sounds, that's not how you win an election, especially not a change election like this one.

You win an election like this one by giving people concrete reasons to vote for you.

You need to sell them on a vision, a set of policies, a narrative -- any one of these thing will do. You just need to have a positive vision and run on it.

This is what Bernie did in the Democratic primaries, it's what Trump is doing right now in his own strange way, and it's what Clinton's campaign is failing to do now, to the detriment of her campaign and the country.

Which is tragic, because she already has all she needs to run a positive campaign.

The Democratic Party now has the most progressive platform in its history, something Clinton herself likes to point out at her campaign stops that are almost never covered by the media.

So, instead of just talking about the platform at rallies, she should run on it in her advertising.

She should rally voters around things like raising the minimum wage, passing a public option for Obamacare, free college, stopping climate change, and making the rich pay their fair share of taxes.

These are all very popular policies, and they're part of a narrative that Clinton should be selling to the American public but isn't, apparently because she's following the great recent Democratic tradition of hiring people who are great at losing a winnable campaign.

This election is as important and as close as any in my lifetime, and a whole more is at stake than many people realize.

Let's hope Hillary Clinton rises to the occasion with a positive message before it's too late.