The South Carolina polls have been pretty uniformly one-sided in favor of Trump, with Marco Rubio nipping at Cruz’ heels for second place in Trump’s dust.

And that’s been extremely perplexing given what can only be described as Trump’s meltdown on that debate state Saturday, with the Bush Lied People Died Code Pink regurgitation and the screaming and yelling and insults of not only his opponents but even the attendees in the hall.

A meltdown, by the way, which he’s largely doubled down on in the days since. For example, his repetitious, idle and idiotic threat that he’s going to sue Cruz for running an ad highlighting Trump’s own statements on abortion.

But the media narrative is that Trump isn’t just undamaged by that performance in South Carolina, he’s benefited from it. And even the media repeating that narrative admit they can’t explain or justify it.

Well, this might be a dose of reality. It might be an indication that the electorate at large, perhaps not in South Carolina but in lots of other places yet to come, got a whiff of Trump on Saturday and has finally had enough. Or maybe it’s just an outlier and The Insane Campaign will revert to type with the next national poll.

Texas Sen. Ted Cruz has surpassed Donald Trump for the top spot in a new national survey of the Republican presidential race from NBC News/Wall Street Journal.

Cruz leads the poll with the support of 28 percent of those surveyed, followed by Trump at 26 percent, Florida Sen. Marco Rubio at 17 percent, Ohio Gov. John Kasich at 11 percent, and Ben Carson at 10 percent.

Trump dropped seven percentage points since last month, and hit his lowest point in the NBC/WSJ poll since October 2015 when Carson took the top spot. Cruz and Kasich each gained eight percentage points since January, the largest improvement of any candidate, and received their highest level of support ever in the poll.

“When you see a number this different, it means you might be right on top of a shift in the campaign,” said Bill McInturff, who conducted the survey with a Democratic pollster on behalf of Hart Research Associates, to NBC. “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.”

Guess what’s conspicuous about that poll other than who’s in first place…where’s Jeb Bush?

Not in the top five.

There are six Republicans running, and Jeb is in last place. With four percent.

It’s time he got out, isn’t it?