NBC News’s Chuck Todd said a few weeks ago that it was strange to have a race with a front-runner, Jeb Bush, who hasn’t actually led in a single poll. Well, that’s no longer true. Bush leads the latest Bloomberg Politics/Saint Anselm College poll of New Hampshire primary voters with 16 percent of the vote, followed by Kentucky senator Rand Paul with 13 percent and Wisconsin governor Scott Walker with 12 percent.

But the poll isn’t all good news for Bush. A full 41 percent of the 400 Republican primary voters polled called the former Florida governor’s views on immigration, in particular his support for “allowing undocumented immigrants to stay in this country,” a “deal killer” when it comes to the possibility of him garnering their support.

If the Republican field is as broad as it is expected to be, Bush may be able to win the Granite State despite that obstacle, but don’t expect him to start softening his views on the subject. The Bush campaign team is committed to letting Jeb be Jeb on matters both personal and philosophical. That means he’ll risk coming off, as one Republican strategist put it, as a moderate rather than as a conservative, as boring rather than impassioned, and of hardening some of the opposition to his candidacy among rank-and-file Republicans.

Can Jeb be Jeb and win the Republican nomination? We’ll see.