The latest CNN/ORC poll has captured a tremendous amount of attention because real estate mogul Donald Trump has hit a polling high of 36 percent. The media pundits and partisans have taken to fretting about Trump winning the Republican nomination. And even Trump believes his poll numbers "go up" when there are national tragedies because he represents strength and we have " weak, sad politicians."

While some of this may be true, there is another reason for Trump's rise: a bad polling practice. When you examine the poll, which was taken from Nov. 27 through Dec. 1, 2015 (which was a holiday weekend and is problematical all by itself in terms of who the respondents were), it is clear that the pollsters chose to ask five questions on the topic of illegal immigration prior to asking about the Republican nomination horserace. This is a bad polling practice that can skew the results.

As Pew Research has explained with respect to the ordering of the presidential approval question, "if the survey first asks about the economy and then asks about presidential approval, the respondent may still be thinking about the economy when answering the latter question ... [and] if the respondent is only thinking about the economy because we brought up the issue, his or her response about the president may be biased by what we call a context effect: In this case we would be priming the respondent to consider the economy in an assessment of the president."

This is essentially what CNN/ORC did with the five questions that were focused on illegal immigration. It's highly likely that the registered Republican respondents whom they queried were still thinking about illegal immigration when they were asked about the Republican candidate they would support for the presidential nomination. And from the moment that Trump burst onto the presidential election stage in mid-June, he has been the candidate who has been most identified with the issue of immigration. Hence, it's not surprising that Trump's support is higher in this poll than in the previous two polls where they did not ask these immigration questions.

Further, when you look back to an earlier poll, which did include the immigration questions (Sept. 4-8, 2015), Trump's support again was in the 30s.

Question order matters. Every pollster and public opinion scholar knows that context effects are real. People can be led towards answers and priming can muddy the results.