Democratic U.S. presidential candidate Senator Bernie Sanders speaks during a Democratic debate hosted by CNN and New York One at the Brooklyn Navy Yard in New York April 14, 2016. REUTERS/Lucas Jackson

Source: Huffington Post

By Ariel Edwards-Levy

Staff Reporter and Polling Director, The Huffington Post

No other 2016 candidate loves citing polls as much as Donald Trump, but Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders might be a close second.

“You know, in virtually all of the general election match-up polls between Trump and Secretary Clinton and Trump and Bernie Sanders, in almost all of those polls, I do better than Secretary Clinton,” Sanders said in a debate Thursday night, crediting his appeal across party lines.

“We are not going to win the White House based on just long-term Democratic votes. We have got to reach out to independents, and I think I am well qualified to do that,” he said.

In an election year that’s produced a slate of notably unpopular frontrunners in both parties, Sanders stands out for his positive image. His average 48 percentfavorability rating, by far the highest among the remaining candidates, makes him the only contender save for Ohio Gov. John Kasich who’s not underwater in the eyes of the American public.

While Sanders and Clinton are about equally popular among Democrats, he inspires considerably less animus from independents and Republicans, according to the most recent Economist/YouGov survey.

And, as Sanders noted, polls of the general election tend to show him racking up larger leads against his Republican rivals than Clinton would.

But there’s a limit to how well polling on hypothetical matchups can predict what will happen in the fall. By mid-April, general election polls tell “about half the story” of the election, according to political scientist Christopher Wlezien, who co-authored a book on the timeline of presidential elections. Voters have been introduced to the candidates and are starting to form lasting perceptions, but their choices aren’t yet locked in.

“In April, with the election a distant seven months in the future, survey respondents do not strongly adhere to their party identifications when asked about presidential candidates,” Wlezien and his co-author, political scientist Robert Erikson, write. In other words, this is exactly the time when Republicans and Republican-leaning independents might flirt with supporting Sanders, even if they’ll ultimately end up returning to their party before Election Day.

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