Polls of the electorate are now coming at us in swarms.  Like summer’s mosquitoes, they are flying in from every direction, and it is hard to get a fix on any one of them.  That is why averaging them makes so much sense.  Every average so far shows Hillary Clinton with a steady lead.  Anything can happen, though, as the uproar over former President Bill Clinton stumbling into Attorney General Loretta Lynch at an airport in Phoenix on Monday demonstrates.

The damage of any Clinton meeting with the individual whose employees are conducting the investigation into the former secretary of state’s handling of her e-mails is the kind of thing that can turn an election won into paradise lost.  While inordinate, it was not an ordinary sting.

I am often asked whether an event yet unforeseen but easily imagined — a terrorist attack on our country in the days ahead of the elections — can suddenly turn the election.  It is, of course, wholly possible.  More likely it would make the 2016 election closer than it should be.  That is, of course, why Clinton’s political advisors should plan for a tight contest.  If they do not do everything today — including maximizing Hispanic/Latino turnout — they could find themselves ruing the day they got carried away by the polls.

In my heart, I cannot see how Donald Trump should do better than any of the candidates who got wiped out at the polls since 1960.  Would Trump make a better President than Barry Goldwater in 1964; George McGovern in 1972; Jimmy Carter in 1980; Walter Mondale in 1984; Michael Dukakis in 1988?  Of course not.  And these far more worthy candidates than Trump got an average of just 48 electoral votes in their landslide defeats.

Given the furies of our times and the latest polling data, however, it seems that Donald J. Trump could make this election closer than the best of the five landslide losers since 1960: Dukakis won 111 electoral votes.

And it is Dukakis who should be on our mind.  His election turned on a dime when in the first question in a debate against George Bush he could not answer in a convincing manner his positon on the death penalty had his wife being raped and murdered.  Game. Set. Match.

It could be that in one small moment Hillary Clinton against the backdrop of a terrorist attack in October, she, too, could make a mistake that suddenly makes Trump — against  all odds — viable.

Aside from candidates shooting themselves in the foot, bad campaign management indeed can cost a candidate his or her election.  John Kerry and Al Gore should not have lost theirs.  Had Gore’s campaign better understood the true significance of the Hispanic/Latino vote in Florida in 2000, hanging chads and a Supreme Court bullied by Antonin Scalia would not have wrecked his election. The contrast, of course, to those two near-misses is Barack Obama’s brilliant 2008 and 2012 efforts, and about 2008 Hillary Clinton knows every detail, of course.

History would have been totally different after 2000 but along came someone like George W. Bush whose Presidency proved his incompetence and plunged the world into what it is today: A general mess that Republicans are trying to pin on Hillary Clinton.   Campaigns — their strategy, their rhythm, their messaging, their image, their mistakes — do matter.

Between now and the election, we will all suffer near-death from the sting of a thousand polls.

But more important is that we do not let Trump get the last bite.

Jesús (Jesse) Treviño is the former editorial page editor of The Austin American-Statesman.