So why not Trump? Early polling doesn’t predict nomination outcomes. The Fix at the Washington Post has been pointing this out regularly. On Sept. 9 in 2011, Perry was leading in national polling of the Republican presidential field. In September 2007, Hillary Clinton was in front for the Democrats, and Rudolph Giuliani led on the Republican side. In 2003 at this point, polls showed Joe Lieberman as the Democratic front-runner. True, Clinton almost won in 2008. But Perry, Giuliani and Lieberman combined to win a grand total of zero primaries and caucuses in their races.

Let’s look at the numbers for other leading candidates as well. In the race for the 2008 nomination, while Giuliani was the polling leader (a position he would hold for another 120 days) with a solid 28 percent of the vote, former Senator Fred Thompson was in second place at 18 percent and rising. Thompson went nowhere in 2008, too. Mitt Romney was in third, with 14 percent. The eventual nominee, John McCain, was down at 10 percent. Huckabee, who won in Iowa and many other states, was at 4 percent in the RealClearPolitics poll average at that point.

I’ll say it again: Trump’s great polling numbers are mainly about name recognition and media attention. Republican voters haven’t made hard-and-firm decisions to vote for him. They are just much more likely to think of him, when pollsters catch them at dinnertime, than they are of the other 16 candidates. And Republican voters are predisposed to like Republican candidates, even fairly odd ones. Beyond that, all the explanations about the appeal of his style or his positions are mostly beside the point — just as those explaining the allure of Giuliani and Thompson were off point in 2007.