Another poll, another Donald Trump lead. 

A new national poll from CNN finds that The D leads the pack. This poll also found that Trump had the biggest post-debate bounce (6 points) between their previous poll in July and now, along with fellow political amateurs Ben Carson (5 points) and Carly Fiorina (4 points). Establishment pseduo-frontrunner Jeb Bush lost ground but fared better here than he has in some polling, coming in second. 

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Here’s the Top Ten: 

Trump 24 percent
Bush,13
Carson 9
Marco Rubio 8
Scott Walker 8
Rand Paul 6
Ted Cruz 5
Fiorina 5
John Kasich 5
Mike Huckabee 4

Junior clowns such as Chris Christie, Bobby Jindal, and Rick Perry, along with other whatsits and whosits, seem to be total afterthoughts now. 

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So here’s where I insert the caveats about Trump having a ceiling and he’s almost certainly not actually going to win the nomination, etc. But could he win Iowa in this crowded field? Absolutely! Could he pull off the upset in New Hampshire too? Who knows! It seems more and more likely that he’ll hang around long enough to make the establishment GOP pretty uncomfortable. Maybe all the way to the convention if he’s having fun…

And there’s clearly a market among the GOP base for his particular brand of nativism and nationalism and, well, sometimes xenophobia. That may drag the Republican contenders to places they don’t particularly want to go. Onetime establishment darling Walker is already saying his own immigration plan is Trumpish. That’s probably not a winning strategy for the general election. 

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