Popular Post By Month in WordPress

I have been trying to get popular posts for the current month. I wrote the code given here. But showing nothing.

?php 
     $query_args = 
        array(
            'posts_per_page'  = 3,
            'post_type' = 'post',
            'date_query' = array(
                                array(
                                    'year' = date( 'Y' ),
                                    'month' = date( 'm' ),
                                ),
                            ),
            'meta_key' = 'wpb_post_views_count',
            'orderby' = 'meta_value_num',
            'order' = 'DESC',
        );

      $the_query = new WP_Query( $query_args );
        ?
    ?php 
    if ( $the_query-have_posts() ) :
    while ( $the_query-have_posts() ) : $the_query-the_post();

    ?
    div class="col-lg-4 col-md-4 col-sm-4 col-xs-12"
        div class="post-item"
            a class="post-thumb" href="?php echo get_the_permalink(); ?" title="?php the_title(); ?"
                ?php echo get_the_post_thumbnail();?
            /a

            h3
                a href="?php the_permalink(); ?" title="?php the_title(); ?"?php the_title(); ?/a
            /h3
        /div
    /div
    ?php endwhile; endif; ?