I did not want to be right this morning when I posted that Democratic gubernatorial challenger Jill Long Thompson has fired most of her field staff on the heels of canceling and scaling back her paid media buys.

I also do not want the dubious honor of being the first pundit/commentator/hack to declare this race over.

I am, however, declaring this race over.

To be fair, some of what has happened since the May primary has not been Thompson’s fault. Mitch Daniels is running a nearly flawless campaign with buckets of money pouring in to pay for beautiful campaign ads that have been airing for months on end. I disagree with Daniels on practically every issue, but no one can accuse him of being a bad politician.

I don’t think someone who lives in multimillion dollar home in a gated community in Carmel has much in common with average working Hoosiers, but he somehow manages to don his flannel shirt and fake it at county fairs and other local events.

For a long time, he was vulnerable because of his misguided policies and the arrogant way he treats the people with whom he works and the voters who put him in that position.

It was always the case that the person who challenged him in November would have to run an equally flawless campaign, but it looked for months like it would be enough for that Democrat to ride the wave as “Not Mitch” and win in what should be a big Democratic year. And yet, in poll after poll, we see the gap between Daniels and Thompson widening while the race between Barack Obama and John McCain stays neck and neck in traditionally red Indiana.

That should tell you something.

Thompson has run for many offices, most of them at the federal level, and plenty of Congressional candidates operate on a schedule the crams a whole lot of campaigning in between Labor Day and Election Day.

Daniels has officially been running for re-election since last summer when he kicked off his campaign at Hinkle Fieldhouse on the Butler University campus.

But it’s more than that. Thompson’s campaign has been disorganized and scattershot since she eked out a narrow victory in the May primary. She had trouble finding a running mate. She’s had trouble raising money. She went off the grid for almost eight weeks, during which time Daniels got to turn the corner on image control by handling flood relief like he invented the sandbag.

Daniels hasn’t put out much in the way of new policy ideas, but neither has Thompson. Her gas sales tax proposal is gimmicky, and every time she comes up with something halfway innovative, Daniels does it himself. (See also: health care pooling for small businesses.) And when Daniels does make a mistake, like using the state’s planes for campaign events, it takes Thompson’s campaign two days to respond with a tepid condemnation and a full week for them to call for Daniels to disclose his travel records to the public.

Now that Thompson has lightened her payroll, there’s a possibility she might be able to turn things around with some good, hard-hitting ads that showcase her strengths while pointing out Daniels’ weaknesses. The ads she’s been running aren’t going to cut it, though. For heaven’s sake, she actually uses Daniels’ campaign logo and a fake RV in the latest one. Talk about enforcing your opponent’s brand. And we won’t even go into the powder blue pantsuit that should have gone to Thrifty Threads a decade ago.

Let me be clear: I hope I’m wrong.

I hope these next 57 days bring out a Jill Long Thompson we haven’t seen before. I hope she can improve her name ID and piggyback on Obama’s incredible field plan, though I find it odd that this is the first time it’s occurred to the JLTeam that they should overlap efforts in that area. Thompson’s campaign manager, after all, is married to Obama’s state director. I can’t imagine they never talk strategy at the dinner table.

I hope these things, but I suspect they will not happen because as I watch Thompson defend her latest cutbacks as “strategic,” I see someone who is spiraling into a vacuum of self-denial.

It’s a hard thing for a candidate to admit he or she is not running a campaign that can win. It’s hard to jettison staffers who bring their JV game to the state championship. It’s hard to look in the mirror and say, “We need to do things differently, and that has to start now.”

I am unhappy that Mitch Daniels is almost certainly going to be elected for another four years. I think that’s bad for our state, and I think he’ll go right back to doing the things he did that pissed off Hoosiers during his first two years in office.

But at this point, I’m calling it like I see it and hoping against the odds that in less than two months, I have to eat these words.