Billionaire Donald Trump is riding high in the latest CNN/ORC Poll. If polls were a stock market you could say Donald Trump is booming. He’s breaking his previous polling record. And this poll was before the carnage in San Bernardino and before Trump said “there’s something going on” with Syrian Muslim refugees and said there’s “something we don’t know” about Obama.” This CNN/ORC poll was taken before he stepped up his playing of the GOP’s favorite rhetorical hits:

Donald Trump is once again alone at the top of the Republican field, according to the latest CNN/ORC Poll, with 36% of registered Republicans and Republican-leaning independents behind him, while his nearest competitor trails by 20 points.

In other words, The Big Mo is staying with Donald Trump and all the comparisons to past political flashes in Republican primary voters’ pans are not operative. The GOP establishment and big Republican donors are starting to realize: this is likely to NOT be a phase the party’s base is going through. More poll:

Three candidates cluster behind Trump in the mid-teens, including Texas Sen. Ted Cruz at 16%, former neurosurgeon Ben Carson at 14% and Florida Sen. Marco Rubio at 12%. All other candidates have the support of less than 5% of GOP voters in the race for the Republican Party’s nomination for president.

Carson (down 8 points since October), former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush (down 5 points to 3%) and Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul (down 4 points to 1%) have lost the most ground since the last CNN/ORC poll, conducted in mid-October.

Jeb Bush down to 3%? He’s trying to sell phone booths to a cell phone Republican political world. What massive development can change 3% to a winning — even to a strong second tier– candidacy?

Cruz (up 12 points) and Trump (up 9 points) are the greatest beneficiaries of those declines. Rubio is also up slightly, gaining 4 points — an increase within the poll’s margin of sampling error — since the last CNN/ORC poll.

It’s interesting where Trump is getting his support:

Republican voters are most sharply divided by education. Among those GOP voters who hold college degrees, the race is a close contest between the top four contenders, with Cruz slightly in front at 22%, Carson and Rubio tied at 19% and Trump at 18%. Among those without college degrees, Trump holds a runaway lead: 46% support the businessman, compared with 12% for Cruz, 11% for Carson and just 8% for Rubio.

Several other recent polls have shown Trump reclaiming a solid lead atop the GOP field after several weeks of near parity with Carson. But the new poll finds the businessman with both his broadest support and his widest lead in any national live-interviewer telephone poll since he announced his candidacy in June.

The poll reflects Trump’s dominance over the rest of the field on the issues voters deem most important to them. He holds massive margins over other Republicans as the candidate most trusted to handle the economy (at 55%, Trump stands 46 percentage points over his nearest competitor), the federal budget (51%, up 41 points), illegal immigration (48%, up 34 points), ISIS (46%, up 31 points) and foreign policy (30%, up 13 points).

Looking at those Republicans who consider each issue to be “extremely important” to their vote, Trump’s standing on each issue is even stronger. Among those Republican voters who call the economy extremely important, for example, 60% say they trust Trump to handle that issue. Among immigration voters, 55% trust Trump on the issue. On foreign policy, Trump inches up to 32%, and among those who call terrorism an extremely important issue, 49% say they trust Trump most on ISIS.

At 3% in the polls, Jeb Bush in free-fall

And then there’s this:

More generally, about 4 in 10 Republicans say Trump is the candidate who would be most effective at solving the country’s problems (42% name Trump, 14% Carson, 12% Cruz, 10% Rubio) and could best handle the responsibilities of being commander-in-chief (37% Trump, 16% Cruz, 11% Carson and 10% Rubio).

Republican voters say they see Trump as the candidate with the best chances to win the general election next November (52% say Trump has the best chances there, compared with 15% for Rubio, 11% for Cruz and 10% for Carson).

RIP the “compassionate conservatism” espoused by George W. Bush and repackaged and reshaped in a newer form by his brother Jeb. The highly publicized Republican autopsy taken after Mitt Romney’s big defeat is now dead. The party’s candidates are taking the advice on the autopsy and doing the opposite. Trump’s rhetoric, including his revival of raising doubts about who Obama “reall” is, is showing that is precisely what the Republican rank and file want.

Blogger Martin Longman in a series of posts has analyzed where the GOP is today and concludes that it’s starting to look like where the Democrats were in 1972 when the party decided to take a sharp ideological swing and nominated George McGovern with stunningly negative electoral results. Read his latest HERE.

Meanwhile, many Democrats have the attitude “he’ll never get elected!” when it comes to Trump. Deja vu about Ronald Reagan, Richard Nixon, and GWB — amid rumblings that if Hillary Clinton gets the nomination some Democrats will stay home on election day to teach their party a lesson. Which they will if a GOPer gets in and makes all those Supreme Court appointments (perhaps they can later borrow George Bush’s “Mission Accomplished” sign.”)

TRUMP DOMINATES ON TWITTER, TOO:

graphic via shutterstock.com

JOE GANDELMAN, Editor-In-Chief

Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.

themoderatevoice.com/