We’re another week closer to the start of the primary voting and we now have yet another GOP primary poll from the Wall Street Journal under our belts. And it’s yet another edition of this regular survey that is showing almost no changes to speak of. Or if there are changes, they aren’t the ones that Donald Trump’s field of primary opponents were hoping to see. The former president still stands alone at the top of the mountain with almost 60 percent support. The only other contender even reaching double digits is Ron DeSantis, but even he has slumped back down to the lower teens. Everyone else remains mired in single digits. And if anyone was wondering if Trump would have a change of heart and start participating in debates, you probably shouldn’t get your hopes up very much unless Trump grows very bored. Why would he participate when he has this sort of lead?

Donald Trump has expanded his dominating lead for the Republican presidential nomination, a new Wall Street Journal poll shows, as GOP primary voters overwhelmingly see his four criminal prosecutions as lacking merit and about half say the indictments fuel their support for him.

The new survey finds that what was once a two-man race for the nomination has collapsed into a lopsided contest in which Trump, for now, has no formidable challenger. The former president is the top choice of 59% of GOP primary voters, up 11 percentage points since April, when the Journal tested a slightly different field of potential and declared candidates.

Trump’s lead over his top rival, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, has nearly doubled since April to 46 percentage points.

The people writing for you here at Hot Air have been doing this for a long time. (Some longer than we would like to admit.) We know the rules of this game and how it’s typically played. Anyone who gets out over their skis and starts calling a race more than three months before anyone votes and with more debates and breaking news surely to come will very often wind up with egg on their face. We get it.

Yes, all of the candidates are still out there on the trail and giving interviews to anyone who will have them, making their case as to why they should get the nomination. There will definitely be more debates. And as CNN and MSNBC love to keep reminding us on a minute-by-minute basis, Donald Trump Has Been Charged With Two Million Crimes And May Be Sent To Prison For A Zillion Years. We understand. The future is never written in stone.

But with all of that said, in order to insert any sort of air of uncertainty into the GOP primary, someone should really have to offer some sort of plausible scenario in which a major shift takes place. Let’s consider what we already know. The candidates have been zooming around all of the early-voting states for months speaking to anyone willing to listen. There has already been one debate and it drew admirable ratings and generated a lot of discussion. And Donald Trump has already been arraigned four times and even had a mug shot taken.

And after all of that, almost nothing has changed. Yes, there has been some early movement in Iowa and New Hampshire, but by the latest counts, Trump is still up by 26 and 39 in those states respectively. Nationally, if the arrests changed anything, they only drove Trump’s numbers up even further and he raised millions of dollars in a matter of days off of the mug shot. What else do we see changing significantly between now and the end of the year? Donald Trump isn’t just leading the field at the moment. He’s crushing it. I honestly can’t recall the last time we saw a lead like this for a non-incumbent president.

So what explains this? James Joyner at Outside the Beltway (who is no Trump fan) highlights Trump’s greatest virtue in the eyes of GOP voters. He’s the one guy who is seen as possibly being able to beat Biden.

I strongly suspect that there’s a very large chunk of Republican voters who would dearly love to find a replacement candidate. But DeSantis has proven not to be that guy. The Ramaswamy boomlet, thankfully, seems to be over. And everyone else is seen as having next to no shot at regaining the White House for the party.

Oh: while polling this far out is next to meaningless, Trump has a slight lead over Biden in the above-linked WSJ poll. And here are the lastest polls aggregated by the folks at FiveThirtyEight:

On the GOP side, this whole thing may be essentially over except for the shouting, and we may not even have all that much shouting to come. It remains impossible to say with any certainty what will happen with the Democrats. They desperately need to get Joe Biden off the stage, but if he won’t voluntarily announce that he’s changed his mind and won’t run for a second term, they don’t have many options. They can’t run a meaningful primary with Biden in the way and the DNC is ruling out any sort of formal debates or primary. And they’re terrified they might wind up being stuck with Kamala Harris. We could still see some sort of bombshell before Christmas but I’m not holding my breath. But as far as the Republicans go, this really looks like it’s Trump’s race to lose, and he doesn’t sound at all interested in losing.