About those polls showing Bernie Sanders doing better against Trump than Hillary Clinton...

Okay so this gets brought up quite frequently by Bernie supporters as their last best argument as to why the super delegates should jumps ship and support their candidate at the convention:

"Bernie Sanders polls better than Hillary does against Donald Trump, and if we choose her Trump will be next President."

I have argued against this repeatedly, but I thought it might be helpful to hear what Politifact had to say about this topic: 

So Sanders is correct that he fares better against Trump than Clinton does in every poll over the past six weeks -- more than 6 points better than Clinton, on average. 

And Sanders is beating Trump by an average of 12 points in these eight polls, so "big numbers" seems like a reasonable description for Sanders to use. 

Case closed? Not quite, say polling experts. 

Clinton has been scrutinized and attacked as a public figure for a quarter century, but Sanders -- even after running for president for a year -- is a relatively new figure to voters nationally. So while a lot of voters’ minds are already made up about Clinton based on her long history in the public eye, it remains to be seen how open potential voters will be to supporting Sanders once Republicans start airing negative attacks, especially ones that note his identification as a democratic socialist. (We have previously reported that, according to polls, being a socialist is a less attractive quality for voters than being an atheist.) 

Kerwin Swint, a political scientist at Kennesaw State University, told PolitiFact Georgia that Sanders shows up so strongly in head-to-head polls because Trump and Clinton have such high negatives. 

"General election polls don’t mean much until the conventions are over and you get to late summer or early fall," Swint said. "A lot of voters don’t look at Sanders as a legitimate threat. It’s almost like he’s an imaginary candidate."

I like that "imaginary candidate" analogy, because in many ways a Sanders campaign is a far left wing liberal dream that has no chance of ever coming true.

Now pay attention to that comment about being a Socialist polling worse than being an Atheist, because that's kind of the key.

As I have written before Atheists often poll even lower than pedophiles in trustworthiness, and being elected as an out of the closet Atheist is a non-starter in a national election.

So if Socialists poll even lower, that means anti-Bernie advertisements for the Republican party simply write themselves.

All Donald Trump has to do is run commercials of Bernie Sanders trying to explain to various pundits that he is a "Democratic Socialist" and his poll numbers will drop through the floor.

It does not make a scintilla of difference if Donald Trump is a racist, woman hating, Putin dry humping egomaniac, because at least he is not a SOCIALIST!

And that is only one line of attack (Though arguably the most effective.), there is still plenty more opposition research to use against Bernie in the general.

And if you don't think the American people are dumb enough to be so easily swayed then ask yourself how come Hillary Clinton's poll numbers were in the mid to high sixties while she was Secretary of State and have now dropped to the low forties since the Republicans, and of course Sanders supporters, have started going after her non-stop for the last year?

Basically average Americans are easily manipulated sheep simply waiting for somebody to herd them from one place to the other. And in the case of the voting public nobody has started herding them away from the Vermont Senator.

Yet.

Bernie Sanders has high poll numbers because nobody has cared enough about him to try and get them lowered. That is the benefit of being an "imaginary candidate."