A new NBC/WSJ Poll shows a politically shocking national shift in the GOP 20016 Presidential race: Texas Senator Tex Cruz has now pulled ahead of previous front-runner showman Donald Trump. And it’s clear that in Saturday Night’s CBS Republican Presidential debate that when Trump blasted George W. Bush for getting the U.S. into the Iraq War and disdainfully dismissed the Republican Party’s longtime mantra that GWB “kept us safe” (Trump pointed our correctly that 911 was on Bush’s watch and Bush had ignored CIA warnings) he turned off some voters. Big time. But is it truly indicative of the trend? Will this be followed by more polls like this or prove to be off base?

Republican presidential front-runner Donald Trump has fallen behind Ted Cruz in the national GOP horserace, according to a brand-new NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll.

In the poll, Cruz is the first choice of 28 percent of Republican primary voters, while Trump gets 26 percent. They’re followed by Marco Rubio at 17 percent, John Kasich at 11 percent, Ben Carson at 10 percent and Jeb Bush at 4 percent.

This cannot be described as anything but a MASSIVE shift — which isn’t to say it can’t or won’t shift back again:

The results from the poll — conducted after Trump’s victory in New Hampshire and Saturday’s GOP debate in South Carolina — are a significant reversal from last month, when Trump held a 13-point lead over Cruz, 33 percent to 20 percent.

Republican pollster Bill McInturff, who conducted this survey with Democratic pollster Peter Hart and his firm Hart Research Associates, says Trump’s drop could signal being “right on top of a shift in the campaign.”

“When you see a number this different, it means you might be right on top of a shift in the campaign. What you don’t know yet is if the change is going to take place or if it is a momentary ‘pause’ before the numbers snap back into place,” he said.

McInturff added, “So, one poll post-Saturday debate can only reflect there may have been a ‘pause’ as Republican voters take another look at Trump. This happened earlier this summer and he bounced back stronger. We will have to wait this time and see what voters decide.”

This poll comes after other surveys — both nationally and in South Carolina, the site of Saturday’s next Republican contest — show Trump with a commanding lead. But some of those weren’t conducted entirely after the last debate like the NBC/WSJ poll.

Another possible explanation for Trump’s decline in the new NBC/WSJ poll is an increase in “very conservative” Republican voters from January’s sample.

In addition to Trump’s decline in the GOP race, the new NBC/WSJ poll shows a nine-point drop in the percentage of GOP primary voters who can see themselves supporting the real-estate mogul — from 65 percent in January to 56 percent now.

The highest candidate scores on this scale: Rubio (70 percent can see themselves supporting him), Cruz (65 percent), Carson (62 percent), Trump (56 percent), Kasich (49 percent) and Bush (46 percent).

I’m not surprised by this poll for a less scientific reason.

From time to time I tune into Rush Limbaugh, or follow what his take is on issues. And, the bulk of the time, it then later becomes the way GOPers see things in polls or how they react to events in Congress. Other conservative talkers were critical of Trump as well, but Limbaugh carries a lot of weight (pun intended). Via Real Clear Politics, here’s Limbaugh on Trump’s debate performance:

Here we are in a Republican primary, and Donald Trump, out of the blue, starts blaming the Bush family for 9/11, for knowing that the intelligence was made up, that there never were any weapons of mass destruction, and they knew it, Trump said.

Michael Moore doesn’t even say that. The World Trade Center came down when George W. Bush was president so don’t anybody tell me, Trump said, he kept us safe.

He jumped all over the Bush family and the Iraq war and claimed that he was on record way, way back as always being opposed to the Iraq war, that it was going to muddy up the Middle East and cause a quagmire. Nobody can find any record of Trump having opposed the Iraq war in 2001, 2002. They asked him about that, and he said (paraphrasing), “I wasn’t a politician back then, so the things I was saying weren’t getting noted like they would be had I been a politician, but I said it.”

On the stage at a Republican debate, Donald Trump defended Planned Parenthood. Not the abortion stuff, he said, but the fact that they do great things for women’s health. Folks, there were a number of occasions where Donald Trump sounded like the Daily Kos blog, where Donald Trump sounded like the Democrat Underground, sounded like any average host on MSNBC.

Then another conservative top gun, Vice President Dick Cheney, also blasted Trump in no uncertain terms (for clear reasons):

Former Vice President Dick Cheney said Donald Trump “sounds like a liberal Democrat” following the billionaire’s recent claims that the George W. Bush administration lied to start the Iraq War and failed to prevent the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

“He sounds like a liberal Democrat to me, Bret, he’s wrong,” Cheney said in an interview Monday on Fox New’s “Special Report with Bret Baier.” ”He’s, I think, deliberately promoting those views in order to advance his political interests.”

..Cheney added that there was no specific intelligence available at the time that former President Bush could have used to prevent the 9/11 attacks. There was only information about a general threat, he said. Trump’s charge that the Bush administration lied about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq was also thoroughly investigated by the Silberman-Robb commission, Cheney said, and the commission found no evidence to support the claim.

“For Mr. Trump to suggest that, in my mind, is way off base. He clearly doesn’t understand or has not spent any time learning about the facts of that period,” Cheney said.

But, actually 1)the Iraq War was indeed a big, fat mistake that has not transformed the Middle East into a beacon of democracy 2)it is a fact George W. Bush was President when 911 occurred 3) it is a fact that administrations of both parties contributed to 911 by their near negligance or failures — and that GWB was indeed alerted several times the summer before 911 about Osama bin Laden and a possible attack.

But, as I always note: one poll does NOT a trend make. Will this follow by other polls? Will Trump score a massive victory in South Carolina (likely to happen) which would give him Big Mo — and Cruz Big Shmo?

The conservative website Red State:

There’s a lot of reason to have skepticism of this poll, given that it is 400 LVs and national polling is pretty inaccurate at this stage of the race. That said, pretty much all the national polling that’s been done to this point has 500 LVs or less and we have been treating them seriously, so there’s no reason to automatically dismiss this one more than the others, except for the fact that it’s so far out of line from what we’ve seen before.

At the end of the day, we can at the very least expect some entertaining histrionics from Donald Trump as he pretends to know the objective difference between a good poll and a bad poll, beyond “A good poll has me in first, a bad one does not.”

Talking Points Memo notes it doesn’t fit in with the trend:

The new poll is out of step with recent national polls, which show Trump maintaining an easy lead in the Republican race.

TPM’s PollTracker Average shows Trump at 34.2 percent support nationally, with Cruz at 21.7 percent.

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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.

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