The 2016 election may be the national media's come-to-Jesus moment.

The idea that the national media is "out of touch" is a criticism that will never go away. But it has a particularly potent sting this campaign cycle due to the endless and unfailingly wrong predictions, thus far, by reporters and political commentators who right from the start said Donald Trump was a racist windbag who was going nowhere.

With each declaration that Trump was done, the opposite took effect. His popularity among Republican voters went up. His rallies got bigger. He started winning primaries.

Months later, Trump has a real shot at winning the party's nomination outright. And his winning streak forced the elite national media to realize that maybe they didn't know that much about how this happened.

David Brooks, a conservative columnist for the New York Times who has said he would never support Trump, offered perhaps the most startling confession.

The media "expected Trump to fizzle because we were not socially intermingled with his supporters and did not listen carefully enough," he wrote at the Times in March. "For me, it's a lesson that I have to change the way I do my job if I'm going to report accurately on this country."

Brooks' words shook his peers and offered a flicker of remorse for what the media has become — arrogant and isolated from a large portion of the country.

Former New York Times executive editor Jill Abramson offered a similar salvo in an interview that same month with Politico.

"I don't think that the press has either made Donald Trump or ignored him," she said. "But, I think that the criticisms of the press, that it's become too much of the elite, I feel that there's some truth to that ... Because so many newsrooms are filled with, you know, Ivy Leaguers like me, but a younger version, who haven't, you know, had the time to go live in the South for a couple of years and meet people who are really different."

The news media's insularity — the major newsrooms and bureaus are almost exclusively in New York and Washington, D.C. — was perhaps best encapsulated in a March 2 column by Nicholas Kristof, also of the Times.

In attempting to explain Trump's appeal to about 40 percent of Republican voters, Kristof purported to interview one of the businessman's supporters and transcribed it for his readers. Except one thing: the "Trump voter" was made up.

The interview was imaginary, which Kristof disclosed in the column. Still, it left the impression that he couldn't bother to find and speak with a real person who might support Trump, or that he didn't know anyone who did.

The column inspired a burning rebuke from political commentator Thomas Frank in The Guardian.

"The views of working-class people are so foreign to that universe that when New York Times columnist Nick Kristof wanted to 'engage' a Trump supporter last week, he made one up, along with this imaginary person's responses to his questions," Frank wrote.

(Kristof followed up in another column in late March with a mea culpa: The media "were largely oblivious to the pain among working-class Americans and thus didn't appreciate how much [Trump's] message resonated ... We inhabit a middle-class world and don't adequately cover the part of America that is struggling and seething," he wrote.)

Trump's campaign message has focused on two things: rejection of "political correctness," and protection of the American economy from outsiders who are perceived as a threat to domestic jobs and higher wages.

Both elements are at odds with a Democratic Party that preaches uncompromising inclusion and a GOP "establishment" that largely pushed the idea that illegal immigrants should be allowed a pathway to legally remain in the U.S.

Trump's message was delivered in Trump fashion, which is to say, it maximized attention from the news media, kept his name in the headlines and drowned out whatever the other 17 candidates had on their own schedules.

When Trump launched his campaign last June, he promised that as president he would protect the country from illegal immigrant "rapists" crossing the U.S.-Mexico border.

In December, he reacted to a terrorist attack in Paris by calling for a complete ban on all foreign Muslims from entering the country.

He has promised to "bring jobs back" from China, to get Mexico to "pay for the wall" and to get other countries in NATO to start "paying their fair share."

Those positions are regularly summed up by journalists as " bigoted," " white nationalist" and " xenophobic."

The alternative, less-hostile interpretation is that Trump is appealing to a group of people who have seen their fortunes vastly reduced in recent decades (under both Republican and Democratic administrations): the working class, white men in particular.

It's the group of people who have suffered from a global economy that incentivizes American companies to manufacture their goods in other countries that pay workers lower wages.

A study published last year by the Hamilton Project said that "one of the most dramatic changes in employment" in the country occurred among men with a high school degree and some with a college education between 1990-2013. In that time, the full-time, full-year employment for that group fell by 8 percent, according to the study.

A December Washington Post analysis showed that Trump's support "remains strongest among those who earn less than $50,000 a year, those who identified themselves as conservatives and white non-evangelicals. But those who do not have a college degree ... still make up the fourth-biggest part of the Trump base."

To many, it's obvious that the national media lost touch with these people.

In an appearance on CNN in March, Philadelphia Daily News columnist Will Bunch said that "too much of our, at least, mainstream elite media news coverage is driven by columnists and pundits who aren't out in the field. They're talking to the consultant class at places like the Capital Grill and [with] consultants who are fighting the last war, who expected Trump to collapse."

Bunch chided the media for having a blindspot to the places where Trump was receiving support.

"The truth is if they'd gone out to places like Kentucky ... these people are happy to talk, and what you'll find a lot is you'll find real stories of people who had their jobs outsourced, they had a good manufacturing job for 20, 30 years, then it was outsourced to Mexico, outsourced to China," he said.

A survey of Republican voters released by Rand Corporation in January offered evidence to support that theory. It said that "voters who agreed with the statement 'people like me don't have any say about what the government does' were 86.5 percent more likely to prefer Trump" over his nearest rival for the GOP nomination, Ted Cruz.

Breitbart News, a right-wing activist news site, has championed Trump's rise and covered his campaign in mostly favorable stories. The stories are popular and the website garners a respectable 12 million unique visitors per month, according to ComScore.

Alex Marlow, the site's editor in chief, said that it's his team's coverage of the areas that Trump sounds off on that resonates with so many readers.

"The vast majority of the establishment press — both liberal and conservative — misread the electorate on all three of these issues," he told the Washington Examiner. "This is partially due to the fact that most of them live in bubbles of New York and D.C. Or worse, they exist primarily on Twitter and tend to talk only among themselves."

Trump remains in a heated battle for the nomination, which many political observers say will result in a brokered GOP convention in July. That would force Trump and the other two remaining candidates (and possibly anyone else who wants to jump in) to cobble up enough support from longtime party loyalists.

If Trump does manage to come out on top, it is widely believed that, for better or worse, he will have forced the GOP to pay attention to the deepest concerns of the working class.

It's possible he will have forced the national media to do the same thing.