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Comment by Absentinsomniac | Hacker News Reader

Ya, pretty sure Sanders does better in polls against Trump than Clinton anyways.

I assume you were downvoted because people thought you were making a snide remark or joke. Sanders polling better against Trump is supposedly[1] a fact, and has been repeated often. Not sure why people would jump to downvoting you for something they didn't really know much about.

1: "Supposedly" because the polls I just looked up seemed to be nearly identical for Sanders or Clinton vs Trump, with Democrats at ~50% and Trump at ~38%.

http://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/2016/president/us/ge...

spread is an average of clinton +10% vs sanders at +16%

Ah, thanks. The Clinton Poll you referenced is one that I saw, the Sanders one was from another source (which I tried to avoid, but I was only willing to put so much effort into it).

While this isn't polling as such, I've found the FiveThirtyEight Facebook map of candidates to be intriguing. When you drop out the other candidates, Trump vs Sanders is still a competition as you'd expect, but Trump vs Clinton... she barely shows up. Her number of Likes is surprisingly low.

http://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/facebook-primary/

I'd usually ignore Facebook likes, and FiveThirtyEight insists it's for fun as well. However, their throwaway comment "If Facebook likes were votes... Donald Trump [would] garner more support than Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio combined" has actually proven to be accurate.

If Facebook likes were votes Sanders would be trouncing Clinton in the polls and Trump would be the only person left running for the Republicans. However, people discussing politics on Facebook tends to be completely toxic and representative of the most enthusiastic, sometimes vitriolic, people around. It's very, very different than the layout of voters as a whole.

I agree with your opinion of politics & Facebook, it's one of the reasons I ended up closing my Facebook account. But the Facebook likes on the Republican side are closer to the current delegate counts (as of April 6) than I would have expected. If you narrow down to Trump, Cruz, Rubio & Kasich:

Trump: 48% Delegates, 53% Republican Likes

Cruz: 32% Delegates, 28% Republican Likes

Rubio: 11% Delegates, 16% Republican Likes

Kasich: 9% Delegates, 3% Republican Likes

Though if you add Carson back in, it stops matching up. And certainly the Facebook Like counts don't match delegate counts on the Democrat side. But I thought it was odd how closely the Facebook figures were matching for the Republicans.

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