Then it was his clash with Megyn Kelly about his treatment of women, followed by his remarks about blood coming out of her eyes. First it was his comments about John McCain’s war record. Pundits have predicted Trump’s demise time and again over the last six months. Those who might argue - or hope - that the Trump fever will break because of the fight with Fox might want to take notice of those, yes, unscientific results. As of early this morning, with some 355,000 votes cast, He earned 62 percent of the vote, with Cruz a distant second at 17 percent, then Marco Rubio and Rand Paul, both with just under 7 percent. Trump pulled out of last night's debate in a dispute with Fox News, so while Drudge couldn't ask who won the debate, he did survey his readers on who they were supporting for president. Trump has dominated the Drudge online poll that has been taken after every televised debate, and, naturally, he loves boasting about it. It’s the unscientific online poll of readers on The Drudge Report. It’s existed in previous campaigns, but it has distinguished itself significantly this year by being perhaps the most consistent indicator of how determined Trump’s supporters are to stick with him.

One indicator that none of the experts have been looking to in their predictions or analysis is something that’s relatively new. Pollsters, strategists, and commentators from left to right have dismissed Trump’s chances of winning the nomination based on the conventional criteria for predicting it, such as polling, endorsements, political resume, and other traditional indicators of winning a party’s nomination. Silver, of course, is not the only one who thought that Trump had virtually no chance of winning the GOP race. He could, of course, still end up being right.

Silver, the statistician extraordinaire who has quite a reputation for using hard data to accurately predict the winners of political campaigns, declared last year that Donald Trump only had about a 5 percent chance of winning the Republican presidential nomination. There’s a new predictor in town, and his name is Matt Drudge.

Dredge report poll