Perhaps the poll’s most stunning finding — and if you’re a Republican congressional staffer, I’d urge you to sit down or put on a helmet so you don’t fall over and get hurt — is that the amiable Cruz who Republicans have encountered on the campaign trail and the debate stage has persuaded them that he is temperamentally better suited than three of his other rivals to work effectively with Congress and enact a conservative agenda. Cruz’s 31 percent rating on this category is higher than that of his fellow freshman senator, Marco Rubio (29 percent), or the mild-mannered Ben Carson (18 percent), or Trump (12 percent).

In other words, Cruz is viewed as a nicer, more capable Trump — nearly three times more consider him the most capable of the four, when it comes to Congress — a view Trump can only have amplified by his actions in Tuesday’s debate. Cruz won the moment he dissuaded Trump from attacking him for talking smack in a private donor meeting. Remarkably, Cruz managed to elicit gushing praise from Trump about what a swell guy he is and even got Trump to withdraw the charge he’d issued a few days earlier that Cruz was “a maniac.” “Let me just say that I have gotten to know him over the last three or four days,” Trump explained during the debate. “He has a wonderful temperament. He’s just fine.” Cruz couldn’t have gotten a more helpful performance from Trump if he’d had him on marionette strings.

Trump, as we all know, is obsessed with his poll numbers. But his bluster tends to mask a pair of analytic flaws. He disparages and ignores polls that displease him (like ours) and he tends to fixate on national polls, even though there is no national primary and those numbers will shift once voting starts…