Let’s pause from the international terrorism news for a moment this morning and recall that we still have a presidential primary going on. We saw last night that Florida continues to deliver great news for Donald Trump and horrible news for Jeb Bush, with Ben Carson finally beginning to sink back down toward the second tier. But before Florida votes there are a few other states, including South Carolina which goes third. The results there are something of a mirror of Florida because following the last debate, The Donald is solidifying his position among Palmetto State Republicans, and the margin isn’t really even close.

Republican presidential hopeful Donald Trump remains the top choice for S.C. GOP primary voters and has a wider lead over Ben Carson than recent polls have shown, a new poll found.

According to the Benchmark Research poll, Trump leads the state’s GOP presidential primary with 25.5 percent support. Carson trails at 17.5 percent.

A poll earlier this month showed Trump with a 4-percentage point lead over Carson. Another poll taken during the same period showed Carson ahead by 1 percentage point.

Trump has pulled back ahead of Carson well outside the margin of error. Meanwhile, Carson has lost ground to Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio who are both less than four points behind him at roughly 14%. Jeb Bush trails both Cruz and Rubio by a wide margin at 6.4% and native son Lindsey Graham is barely above the statistical background noise level at 3.2%.

This poll was taken entirely after the last debate (November 12-15) but also includes a couple of days after the Paris attacks. You can’t really read into the specifics of what’s driving the shift, but Trump’s hard line on foreign policy can’t be hurting him at this point as the nation focuses once again on ISIS in specific and terrorism in general. The President is vacillating while Trump is delivering some NSFW responses as shown here.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_FTHXgmzURM

The numbers seem to speak for themselves at this point. There’s definitely a residual reluctance among a majority of Americans when it comes to the idea of another long term, bogged down ground war for American troops in that part of the world, but we’re also enough of a nation of realists to realize that we are indeed going to need to pound the **** out of them and Trump is the one delivering what’s needed.

Meanwhile, Jeb Bush decided to play catch-up in this policy area over the weekend and called for US troops to combat the terrorists. Is that going to move the needle? Somehow I doubt it. He’s pretty late to the party on this, having said as recently as August that there was no need for boots on the ground. Also, his delivery is far less fire and brimstone and more professorial. There are times when that’s appropriate, but people seem to be looking for a warrior right now and that’s the role Trump staked out for himself pretty much as soon as he stepped in the ring.