It was a little-noticed event, but one that is emblematic of why Donald Trump has done such a good job outsmarting Hillary Clinton.

In a campaign appearance at the University of Northern Colorado a week ago, Trump posed for a photo holding a rainbow flag emblazoned with the words "LBGTs for Trump" as he accepted the endorsement of the Colorado Log Cabin Republicans.

I challenge you to name one other Republican who could have pulled that off while also receiving the enthusiastic support of just about every redneck and cowboy within a hundred miles - which is a lot of rednecks and cowboys if my visits to Greeley are any indication.

Ted Cruz? Marco Rubio? John Kasich? Not a chance.

How about that Bush fellow? What was his name?

Oh yeah, Jeb.

When this race started early last year, the consensus among the experts was that we were headed for another Bush-Clinton election.

The Democrats kept their side of the bargain. As for the Republicans, they backed that guy whose supporters amounted to "something like 6 to 8 percent of the electorate overall, or about the same share of people who think the Apollo moon landing was faked."

That was how noted statistician Nate Silver of the 538.com website assessed the Donald's chances back in 2015.

Silver got everything right about the 2012 race when he was with the New York Times. So why did he get everything wrong about the Donald?

Maybe he didn't listen to the guy who said "The presidency of the United States is not some crown to be passed between two families."

That guy was not a Trump supporter. That was former Maryland Gov. Martin O'Malley, who made a brief run against Hillary Clinton in the Democratic race before bowing out.

That left Bernie Sanders. Sanders wasn't even a Democrat and he almost beat her.

There was a message in that, but the Democrats may be learning it too late. They're stuck with their pretender to the throne while the Republicans are united behind a candidate who wants to end the monarchy.

The reason this race has surprised so many pols and pundits is obvious: Hillary Clinton does not share her husband's penchant for what the media praised as "triangulation" back when the first Clinton was beating the first Bush.

Here's how Clinton's svengali Dick Morris put it after that 1992 victory: "You take the best from each party and you bring it together in an amalgam of what the American people want. Triangulation was a method of moving the Democratic Party from here to here."

Bill Clinton pulled that off by stealing Republican ideas on hot issues like welfare reform. Trump is doing it by stealing what used to be Democratic ideas in areas like trade and foreign policy.

Jeb Bush: Donald Trump made short work of his claim that his brother "kept us safe" and that deposing Saddam Hussein was "a good deal."

The most brilliant moment in either campaign came when the Donald confronted the Jeb over what the House of Bush considered to be its sainted legacy, the idea that Bush 43 "kept us safe" after 9/11 and also deposed the evil dictator of Iraq.

The GOP hierarchy was shocked when Trump told Bush that 3,000 Americans had been killed by terrorists on his brother's watch - and that we'd have been better off leaving Saddam Hussein in charge of Iraq because at least he knew how to run the damn place.

Most of the pundits portrayed this as a gaffe. In fact it was as brilliant a piece of triangulation as anything Bill Clinton ever pulled off. So was Trump's adoption of populist rhetoric on trade.

Clinton didn't intend to run this race as the pro-intervention, pro-big business candidate. But that's the box into which Trump put her.

The most insightful liberal commentary on this came the other day from historian Thomas Frank in the pages of The Guardian, a socialist newspaper from London.

Frank is the author of a 2004 book about a state bordering Colorado, "What's the Matter with Kansas?" The matter was that Kansans voted Republican, he wrote, when their economic interests were better served by the Democrats.

But now that he's had a chance to look at those emails hacked from the account of Clinton campaign chair John Podesta, Frank gives us a most insightful look at what he terms "the upper reaches of the American status hierarchy in all its righteousness and majesty" who vacation in Martha's Vineyard every summer.

"Read these emails and you understand, with a start, that the people at the top tier of American life all know each other," he writes. "They are all engaged in promoting one another's careers, constantly."

Of course the same is true of the Republicans who frequent the Bush compound up the coast a bit in Maine. But their candidate is safely back in Florida where he belongs.

The Democrats' candidate is on the ballot - and this year that is a most precarious place to be.

PLUS- NO HANKY-PANKY AT THE POLLS? The democrats - and the media - insist there is very little vote fraud going on in America for this election because so few people have been charged with it.

That's like saying that almost no one drivers over the speed limit on the Parkway because just a few dozen tickets are given out each day.

The fact is that most elections are not monitored and there are all sorts of ways to get unfair advantages. Check this article about a State Police raid of a get-out-the-vote operation in Pennsylvania that allegedly used fraudulent registration forms.

You probably saw my prior post about "knock-and-drag" voter turnout operations in Philly. In it I mentioned how I was on a cruise with a bunch of left-wingers after the 2000 election when they all cheered a speaker who revealed an illegal "ground war" in Massachusetts that year.

There's a lot of this going on in the big cities, boys and girls. See video below: