That examination will hinge in part on a new CBS/New York Times poll, which shows the GOP field as we're used to seeing it: Trump up big, Cruz in second pushing backward against Marco Rubio and, suddenly, John Kasich. But before we dive into that, I would like to point out something else from that CBS/Times poll, because I cannot resist bringing it up as soon as possible.

The pollsters asked GOP voters if the policy proposals of the leading Republicans were realistic. About a third of respondents said that those of Cruz and Rubio weren't. But fully one half -- a neat, precise 50 percent -- said that Trump's weren't.

That's staggering. Thirty-five percent of those asked say they support Trump as their candidate, meaning that the 50 percent shown here could be from the 65 percent of Republicans who don't plan to vote for him. But CBS and the Times also asked whether voters would support Trump, Cruz and Rubio if any of them won the nomination. Only about a third of Republicans said that they would support Trump only because he was the nominee or that they wouldn't support him at all -- a lower number than for Cruz or Rubio.

That figure, though, means that some slice of the electorate thinks Trump's policy proposals are unrealistic but would vote for him anyway.

We're being generous in our assumption that none of Trump's supporters fall into the 50 percent who think his proposals are unrealistic, of course. There are certainly people who like Trump and plan to vote for him and who also think his policies are unrealistic. Part of Trump's appeal, after all, is his willingness to dispense with the norms of politics, up to and including robustly articulated policy proposals. Forty-three percent of Republicans think Trump is also the candidate most likely to get things done in Washington. Do those people overlap with the 50 percent who find his proposals unrealistic? What a tangled web we weave when first we ... poll.

All else aside, that "realistic" question does suggest that there's a deeper skepticism about Trump than about his competitors. Which brings us back to that unusual NBC/WSJ poll showing Trump trailing Cruz. As we noted Wednesday, the density of the "very conservative" vote was higher than in past NBC/WSJ polls, which tends to favor Cruz. In the CBS/Times poll, you can see how ideology affects vote choice: Trump and Rubio do about the same across the board, while Cruz and John Kasich do better at one end of the spectrum or the other.

That's not all of it. If we plot the Real Clear Politics polling average against the results of individual polls, which are conducted over multiple days, the messy result looks something like this. Take a second to make sure this makes sense.

The Cruz and Trump results from that NBC/WSJ poll are shown in the black circle. You can see how far apart from the other results they are. This tends to suggest that they may be an outlier.

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Notice that the survey was conducted later than all of the others -- including the CBS/Times poll we've been talking about. It was conducted completely after the last Republican debate, for example, which by most non-Donald Trump measures was not a good debate for Donald Trump. Was this an actual inflection point in the race?

Maybe. Maybe not! The problem with polls, as we say over and over, is that they are snapshots of a horse race taken at a particular point from a particular angle. It's hard to tell who's moving up or falling back from one photo, which is why we use averages. Until we get more photos, it's not totally clear how the horses are moving -- or if this was just taken from a bad angle.

This won't matter much over the next seven days. Trump is poised to win both the South Carolina primary and the Nevada caucus, according to polls. National polling won't have a big effect on that, but as more states vote it can be an indicator of the mood of the electorate at large. And that mood is: We don't think Trump's policies are realistic, but we want him to win.