Why the Candidates Losing the Primary are all Polling Best in the General

The last few days it's been touted that Kasich will do best in the general based on general election polls in March. These polls are meaningless, but they insist on doing them and people insist on making something out of them.

And of course the Bernie team has been brandishing general election polls that show him beating Trump by more than Hillary as proof he's the more electable candidate in the general. If this is true it'd be quite something: the most electable candidates are losing badly in the primary. 

Bill Palmer at DailyNewsBin has some good advice regarding two kind of polls you want to avoid right now:

"We’ve reached what’s often referred to as the “silly season” of a presidential election cycle. The frontrunners are trying to pivot to the general election, the losing candidates are saying and doing anything they can try to hang on, voters are being polled after they’ve already voted, and many of the poll numbers involved turn to mush. Here are two kinds of polls you want to ignore at this point in the election cycle, and the only two kinds of polls that currently aren’t gibberish:

"Ignore: One party’s frontrunner against the other party’s losing candidate. Non-frontrunners do artificially well in polls against the other party’s frontrunner, for a number of reasons. So when the second or third place candidate says “I do better against the other party than my own party’s frontrunner does,” it’s hogwash. In fact, the worse a candidate is doing in his own party, the better he paradoxically does in cross-party matchups. For instance, Rubio and Carson both scored their best numbers against the democrats in their final week before dropping out. When you hear a losing candidate quoting these numbers, it’s a sign of desperation. So when Ted Cruz and Bernie Sanders claim that they’d do a little better against the other party’s frontrunner, they may have some numbers to back it up, but it’s not valid data."

"Ignore: National polls comparing a democrat to a democrat, or a republican to a republican. The entire concept makes no sense right now. The majority of the states have already voted, yet people in those states are still being polled on who they’re planning to vote for. No one even knows how to answer the questions. It’s why the various national polls have about a fifteen point variance right now in both parties. Is Hillary Clinton really winning by five points or eighteen points? Is Donald Trump really winning by three points or twenty points? Pollsters are currently giving us all of those numbers, and most of them can’t be right, so they all have to be ignored until primary voting is over."

"Valid: State polls in the states that haven’t voted yet. These don’t always end up being correct, but they often do. Polling in closed primary states is the most accurate, while open primary states are less accurate, and caucus states are rarely accurate. But these state polls remain the best insight we have into who is likely to win each of the remaining primary states."

"Valid: Matchups between the two frontrunners. At this stage of the game the average voter is under the impression that the two frontrunners are going to be the nominees (whether it’s true or not), so this particular comparison polls provides a decent look at how the two will do if they go head to head."

http://www.dailynewsbin.com/opinion/non-frontrunners-are-artificially-favored-in-cross-party-polling-at-this-stage-of-an-election/24226/

UPDATE: I just conferred with Harry Enten himself on Twitter and he agrees that there is no logic in national polls that poll folks in states which have already voted.

https://twitter.com/ForecasterEnten/status/713378437658861568