With the first primaries less than six months away, Donald Trump is leading the Republican field and has been for over a month.
And the Republican establishment has, for over a month, wailed and whined and done just about everything legally in their power to try and stop him.
Now why would they want to stop a man who is beloved of their base voters? Why does the prospect of Trump as the nominee - or Trump running as a third-party candidate - scare them so? After all, most of his views align with those of his GOP rivals; he just states them more clearly, dispensing with coded language.
It all comes down to this: the general election. And while most of the publicly-released polls taken show Trump losing to Hillary (usually by large margins, as shown here), their internal polling must be even uglier from their POV, because their attacks on both Trump and Hillary have got even more frantic in the past few weeks.
If the GOP's internal polls really showed that Trump had a chance against Hillary, we'd be seeing him get the red carpet treatment from the GOP establishment. Reince Priebus would be giving him foot massages, and FOX would have given him kid-gloves treatment in the debates. Instead, the exact opposite continues to be the case. And that's the bottom line.