Jonathan Allen: Face it: Trump’s the true GOP favorite now

There’s something the chattering classes along the Acela Corridor don’t want to say about Donald Trump: He’s the overwhelming favorite to win the Republican presidential nomination. For the Republican Party’s conservative — in more ways than one — establishment, it’s as if admitting that will make it come true. So instead, they squabble over who the “real” front-runner is, whether it’s Marco Rubio or Ted Cruz. Perhaps, the parlor wisdom holds, a dark horse like Chris Christie can overtake the field at the New Hampshire turn. For the first few months, the Trump deniers — loud on national television, insistent on Twitter and ever-present in the nation’s leading print and digital outlets — could be called wishful thinkers. With the primaries just around the corner, as many otherwise smart political analysts keep waiting, aching, for conventional order to be restored, it’s time to call them what they are: delusional. HALF OF U.S. VOTERS WOULD BE EMBARRASSED IF TRUMP WAS PREZ Trump is leading national polls by more than 20 points in a field with more than a dozen candidates. Nor is this just a Rudy Giuliani-style lead that doesn’t translate to state contests. He’s sitting on a double-digit lead in New Hampshire, holds a 20-point edge in South Carolina and runs 27 points ahead of his nearest competitor in Georgia. Though he’s probably going to lose Iowa’s first-in-the-nation caucus to Cruz, who’s leading in the polls there, Trump could finish a strong second. He’s first or near it in Nevada, Florida, Massachusetts, North Carolina, Missouri and Ohio. He’s in the lead in nearly every state that has been polled. All those leads have held up after a dozen predicted collapses.