And yet, this entire campaign could hardly have played out better for her. She doesn’t have the nomination wrapped up yet, but if you were Clinton, how much would you change about how the presidential campaign has gone, in both parties?

Let’s start with her opponents. What would Clinton have hoped for in competition during the primaries? Well, you could start with a couple of candidates who never get anywhere, just to make it seem like a real race. Then you could have a main competitor who gains enough strength to push you and keep you on your toes, but not quite enough to take the nomination from you. In Bernie Sanders, that’s what she got. Sanders mounted an unexpectedly strong challenge, which has forced Clinton to campaign aggressively. Yet he hasn’t been able to penetrate too deeply into Clinton’s base of support among the party’s core constituencies, particularly African-Americans. Unlike Barack Obama eight years ago, he isn’t a dynamic campaigner with broad appeal whose strengths highlight Clinton’s weaknesses.

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Because he has raised plenty of money, and because he wants to exert maximum influence on the party and pull it as leftward as he can, Sanders is likely to stay in the race all the way to the convention, or at least until Clinton secures a majority of delegates. That requires Clinton to keep campaigning, which is an investment in the general election. The more states she visits — and has to establish an organization, including networks of volunteers — the better positioned she is for the general (the long 2008 primary campaign was a great help to Obama in seeding a national organization).

And while the primary campaign has pushed her, it hasn’t wounded her. Sanders proudly says that he’s never run a negative ad in his career and has no interest in getting nasty. And he’s largely stuck to that. While he has criticized Clinton plenty, it’s been almost entirely on policy terms. The most personal attack he has thrown at her is that she’s too close to Wall Street and will therefore not be tough enough on the big banks. He hasn’t seriously gone after her on things like the email controversy, or tried to make a broad case that Clinton is untrustworthy, which is her greatest potential weakness.

So Clinton will emerge from the primary campaign toughened but not diminished. Now look at what has happened on the Republican side. Their primary campaign has alienated and energized many of the groups Clinton will need most in a general election, particularly Latinos. While there’s plenty of intrigue left to come and the outcome is far from certain, the most likely outcome at this point is that the Republican Party will nominate Donald Trump, who may turn out to be the most unpopular general election candidate either party has ever nominated. In our latest poll, Trump’s net favorability rating is -37, with 30 percent of respondents saying they have a favorable view of him and 67 percent saying they have an unfavorable view.

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Opinions about Clinton have always been closely divided — in this poll, 46 percent view her favorably and 52 percent view her unfavorably — but she couldn’t ask for a better opponent than Trump. Even on her weakest attribute, honesty and trustworthiness, she does far better than him. She scores a net rating of -22, with 37 percent saying yes, she’s honest and trustworthy, and 59 percent saying no. That’s bad, but not nearly as bad as Trump, who scores a net -42 (27 percent yes, 69 percent no). And on the attributes where Clinton scores highly — having the right experience, having the right personality and temperament — Trump does even worse, with respective scores of -47 and -47.

I’ll give you just one more set of numbers: while 74 percent of Democrats say they’ll be satisfied with Clinton as their nominee (and 72 percent say the same about Sanders), only 51 percent of Republicans say they’ll be satisfied if Trump carries the GOP banner. So what we’ll have in the general election, presuming Clinton and Trump are the nominees, is a unified Democratic Party that is perfectly happy with its nominee, facing off against an utterly divided Republican Party, half of whose voters wish they could rally behind someone else. That’s not to mention the fact that there will be Republicans actually campaigning against Trump, telling their allies not to vote for him.

Could things change? Of course. We might slip into a recession. There could be a new scandal of some sort affecting Clinton. Republicans might finally find the Benghazi or email scandal they are certain must be out there somewhere. Trump’s inevitable general election makeover might actually convince voters he’s an entirely different person than he was during the primaries. Or Republicans might find a way to nominate someone less repulsive.