And that brings me to my last mistake about Trump's chances: I underestimated how bad Hillary Clinton's campaign would be. To be fair, I never thought Clinton was a particularly strong candidate. But at every essential task of marketing and messaging, the Clinton campaign has been surprisingly bad.
We all know Trump's key slogan/promise is "Make America Great Again." I'm still not sure what Hillary Clinton's key slogan/promise is and I follow her campaign very closely. Is it "I'm with Her?" If so, it's not very good in that it doesn't seem to have anything in it for the person who isn't "her."
Clinton's Twitter feed and website are helping Trump immensely as they seem to pump out phrases like "a Trump presidency," and "President Trump" more often than Trump does himself. These kinds of messages present and reinforce the idea of an actual President Trump in our subconscious brains. This is why the old TV commercials for consumer products when we were growing up used to avoid naming competing products as anything other than "brand x."
Clinton is frankly being poorly served by campaign manager Robby Mook, who has worked on campaigns his entire career. Mook and his staff going up against master private-sector marketers like Trump and company have little chance to win in that arena. Heck, this group can't even put away Bernie Sanders, who, in contrast, is also a candidate who presents a lot more clear messaging and the appearance of a more authentic personality. And the worst news for Clinton is that it may already be too late to hire a new staff and present a new image to the public.
Of course, this election is still not over. But what is over is any notion that Trump is going to lose by some kind of landslide. I predict many more of my fellow pundits will come to this realization in the coming weeks.
Commentary by Jake Novak, supervising producer of "Power Lunch." Follow him on Twitter @jakejakeny.
For more insight from CNBC contributors, follow
@CNBCopinion
on Twitter.