But it's equally important to differentiate between the positions of Trump and Sanders in their respective races. Amazing as it may seem, polls suggest that Trump is a legitimate contender for the Republican nomination. Polls also suggest that Sanders's path is much, much more difficult.

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Take new polling from the wordy partnership of NBC, the Wall Street Journal and Marist (henceforth "the pollsters"). They released polls from Iowa, New Hampshire and — crucially — South Carolina on Thursday morning, providing an interesting look at the state of each race.

Trump leads in all three states. Sanders is close in Iowa, leads in New Hampshire and trails in South Carolina. But that doesn't tell the whole story.

Let's compare the leads of both candidates among demographic groups with how strong the turnout was from those groups the last time the party had a contested nomination (2012 for the Republicans, and 2008 for the Democrats).

For Trump, his support is good across the board. He does better with men than women, but leads with both genders — and men turned out more in Iowa and New Hampshire in 2012 anyway. He doesn't do as well among evangelicals and conservatives as he does overall, but he still leads with both groups in all three states. He does better among lower-income voters, but leads with higher-income ones who turn out more.

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Despite leading by more with lower-turnout groups, Trump is also leading in the highest turnout categories. Whether his voters will get to the polls this year is another question (that we'll deal with in another post), but the story is that his strength is relatively uniform across all three states.

The story for Sanders is different.

Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina are three very different states on the Democratic calendar. In Iowa and New Hampshire, there isn't enough racial diversity to break out non-white voters, so we have to set that to the side. Sanders does much better among men than women than Hillary Clinton does, although in all three states women turned out more than men in 2008. He does much better with younger voters than with very old voters.*

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New Hampshire is the ideal state for Sanders to run strong: It's mostly white and he has a home-field advantage from representing Vermont, the state next door, for so many years. In Iowa, where the playing field is more level, the race is essentially tied, with different polls (and their different samples and methodologies) showing Clinton and Sanders jockeying for the lead. Iowa, too, is mostly white, as we noted before.

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In South Carolina, though, which isn't mostly white, Clinton romps. It's hard to separate out her strength with black voters from her strength with older voters and more liberal voters in that state, because there's overlap. But as we've noted before, the electorate of most primary states looks a lot less white than that of Iowa and New Hampshire.

We are not saying that Donald Trump is going to win or that Bernie Sanders is going to lose. But Donald Trump's lead in these new polls is consistent and broad, and the Republicans who are going to the polls in these states are generally similar in demographic composition. Sure, there are more conservatives and evangelicals in Iowa, but Trump leads with them, so it doesn't matter.

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On the Democratic side, the electorate is much more fragmented, which plays to Sanders's advantage in Iowa and New Hampshire. The flip side of that coin, though, is that Clinton's lead doesn't look like Trump's right now, either.

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The Republican race, with its countless candidates, is harder to predict, even though the Democratic one is less unified. But the numbers suggest that between Trump and Sanders, Trump has the better shot at actually winning.