Ted Cruz didn't just soak up a lot of applause for slamming the CNBC moderators. He broke a debate record.

You know it's bad when Chris Christie can look someone in the eye and say, "Even in New Jersey what you're doing is called rude." However, that's exactly what he did at one point during the highly criticized CNBC Republican debate on Wednesday, addressing not a political opponent on stage but the moderators themselves.

In fact, while there were surely plenty of elbows thrown between candidates, no attack was so vicious — or resonated so deeply — as Ted Cruz's takedown of the moderators and, more generally, the media as a whole. According to a "live dial" test pollster Frank Luntz has been using at debates since 1996 to measure "human emotion and feeling," Cruz's tirade reached the highest score among viewers ever recorded, peaking at a 97/98 out of 100.

"One hundred means that every person in the group would have had their dials to 100. So this score means that 24 of the 26 [participants] had their dials as high as they would go…[Cruz] said what every conservative has been thinking…They really hate these moderators," Luntz told Politico's Mike Allen. Luntz also emphasized to CNN that 98 is "the highest score we've ever measured. EVER."

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Before Wednesday night, the highest dial test scores were held by Mike Huckabee in 2008 and Herman Cain in 2012. Overall, Luntz told Politico that "Cruz won the first half. Christie the second half, and Rubio did well throughout."

Watch Cruz crush the moderators here.