Polling in May
Excerpt below is from this article on five reasons why Bernie should stay in the race, and five counterarguments. One of them is below. Here is the rest of the article:
http://www.borntorunthenumbers.com/2016/05/should-he-stay-or-should-he-go.html
2) Sanders does better than Clinton in head-to-head polling versus Trump and thus superdelegates should be persuaded by that “fact” to flip their support to him
It is true that in May polls, Clinton leads Trump by +3 and Sanders leads Trump by +11. But there are two good reasons to heavily caveat these results, if not completely dismiss them.
It is laughably early to rely on polls in May to predict outcomes in November. Here are the results of May polling in the last 9 presidential elections. Yes, they were wrong in 7 out of the 9, and the margins were usually wildly different. They were never correct in a year when neither candidate was an incumbent, unless you count Bush in 2000 (he lost the popular vote but won in the Supreme Court Electoral College). To go to a superdelegate and ask him or her to use May polling as a fact-base for flipping the verdict of an entire primary season seems ludicrous.
1980: Carter 40, Reagan 32, Anderson 21 (actual outcome: 41/51/7)
1984: Reagan 53, Mondale 43 (59/41)
1988: Dukakis 52, Bush 38 (46/53)
1992: Bush 35, Perot 35, Clinton 25 (37/19/43)
1996: Clinton 49, Dole 35, Perot 15 (49/41/8)
2000: Bush 46, Gore 41 (48/48)
2004: Kerry 47, Bush 46 (48/51)
2008: McCain 47, Obama 44 (46/53)
2012: Romney 46, Obama 43 (47/51)
The second point is that GOP and its media surrogates have spent 25 years slamming and sliming Hillary Clinton, in the most wildly inflated terms. They have not spent a single nanosecond doing the same to Bernie Sanders. You can be sure that if Sanders made it to a general election, they would savage his known vulnerabilities (his self-proclaimed “Democratic Socialism,” the huge cost of his many pet programs, his 30+ years in Washington, DC, his age) and whatever else they might dig up. His poll numbers inevitably would decline – just ask John Kerry. Whatever you may think of Hillary Clinton, there is nothing new here for Donald Trump, especially if the FBI fails to indict her. He may pound her, but he can only use information America has absorbed for 25 years. And he is unlikely to touch Bernie’s most compelling attacks on her – her ties to Wall Street. So the poll numbers reflect all known information on Hillary Clinton, while Bernie’s more or less reflect pristine treatment.
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