Upstart Democratic presidential primary candidate Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) is making his last-ditch pitch for Iowa voters to give him a victory that could lead to a sweep in the first two states, and part of that pitch has to do with his ability to defeat a Republican in the general election. Leading fact-checking outfit Politifact has taken one of Bernie’s claims to that effect and decided that although hi pants are not quite on fire, it is their scientific consensus that they are warming:

“Almost all of the polls that — and polls are polls, they go up, they go down — but almost all of the polls that have come out suggest that I am a much stronger candidate against the Republicans than is Hillary Clinton,” he told voters during a Jan. 19 town hall meeting in Underwood, Iowa. …Our ruling Sanders said, “Almost all of the polls that have come out suggest that I am a much stronger candidate against the Republicans than is Hillary Clinton.” The NBC News/Wall Street Journal national poll released before Sanders’ statement supports his claim for Trump, but it has no data against Cruz or Rubio. Earlier polls say he doesn’t outperform Clinton at all against Cruz, Rubio or Bush, and the narrow races combined with the margins of error make his contention even more dubious. Beating Clinton in only two of eight hypothetical matchups is far from “almost all.” The statement is not accurate, so we rate it False.

I’m not one of those people who slobber all over Politifact because their rulings are often as nonsensical as the claims they’re testing. In truth, there are so many polls out there that you could pick out any ten polls to support whatever conclusion you’d like. According to RCP’s head-to-head averages, Sanders is right, he does better than Hillary against Trump and Cruz, arguably the only two that matter at this point.

The better question is whether this matters. Bernie’s head to heads with Republicans are being done in a sterile environment in which no one has yet begun to sling mud at Bernie, while Hillary has been standing in front of a fan at a pig farm at sloppin’ time for going on 25 years now.

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