As FiveThirtyEight has already written, Bernie Sanders could win both Iowa and New Hampshire and then lose to Hillary Clinton everywhere else.

That didn’t seem very likely in early July, but it looks entirely possible now.

A Quinnipiac poll released earlier today was the first to show Sanders leading Clinton in Iowa. Sanders already holds a solid lead in the RealClearPolitics polling average for New Hampshire. While the 41-40 split in Iowa was within the margin of error, and other recent polls have shown Clinton with a (narrowing) lead, it’s still a big deal. Especially since Clinton’s standing would likely further deteriorate if Joe Biden officially throws his hat in the ring.

Sanders was an afterthought when he first entered the race — a protest candidate with no real shot at winning. Now, he’s got The New York Times writing (admittedly contrived and premature) articles about the Democratic establishment looking for a Plan B in case Hillary implodes.

Things could get worse for Hillary before they get better. As Ryan Cooper argued in The Week earlier today, much of Hillary’s buoyancy in the polls comes from her assumed strength in the general election relative to Sanders, but that assumption may not hold. Were Sanders to win the nomination, the Democratic base would have no problem coalescing around him, and party elites would realize that, with Republicans controlling Congress, they wouldn’t have to worry about any of Sanders’s proposed tax increases on the wealthy taking effect. Faced with the prospect of a President Bush or Trump, the Democratic Party should have no problem forming a coalition around Sanders.

As Cooper wrote, “The difference between any two Democratic presidents is going to be relatively tiny compared to that between a Democrat and a Republican.”

I’d take Cooper’s argument a step further: The case against Sanders’s electability is based on the assumption that because he calls himself a socialist, he’s too extreme to be President. But he isn’t. As I’ve written before, as measured by DW-Nominate, Sanders’s voting record makes him about as liberal as Republican Senator David Vitter is conservative. And Vitter isn’t known for being two standard deviations more conservative than his colleagues; he’s known for canoodling women who are not his wife, paying for the experience and pulling strings to have journalists who ask about it fired. In the last Congress, Sanders wasn’t even the farthest-left Democrat in the Senate, with Elizabeth Warren and Tammy Baldwin both registering more liberal voting records.

What’s more, what constitutes the center in Washington bears little resemblance to what constitutes the middle in the rest of the country. When you ask voters how they feel about socialism, they bristle, but when you ask them about the policies that social democrats like Sanders advocate, they love them. From polling conducted by the Progressive Change Institute:

77% of likely 2016 voters support universal Pre-K

71% support letting people buy into Medicare, and 51% support “Medicare-for-all” single payer health insurance

71% support a large-scale ($400 billion/year) infrastructure program

70% support a “Green New Deal,” entailing a massive investment in green energy jobs

59% support the establishment of a basic income

59% support raising the top marginal tax rate to 50% (the rate during Reagan’s presidency), and 54% support the creation of a new tax bracket for millionaires and billionaires.

55% support a financial transactions tax

You can check out PCI’s full results and methodology here.

Americans also feel that our economic distribution should be far more equal — and that’s without understanding how absurdly unequal it already is:

All this is to say that many of the planks in Sanders’s platform are simply assumed by the media as being extremely liberal, despite the fact that they enjoy support from a majority of the electorate. And that’s to say nothing of unlikely voters, who are both disproportionately liberal on economic issues and more likely to engage in the political process if they feel there’s a candidate in the race who actually represents their interests — a claim Hillary Clinton can’t make with any credibility. Give Sanders a platform to make his case to the American people during the general election — once they’ve actually started paying attention to politics — and there’s every reason to believe they’ll respond favorably.

What’s more, independent voters don’t actually exist, at least not to a significant degree. So even if all of the above weren’t true — if Sanders really was an “extreme” liberal who turned off moderates — it wouldn’t matter. His ability to energize the base and engage new voters would more than make up for any ground he gave up in the middle.

The one remaining case for Hillary’s electability would be that, as a former Secretary of State, she has foreign policy credentials that Sanders lacks. But with the media’s incessant (and ridiculously unfair) focus on her private email server, along with Republicans’ incessant (and ridiculously unfair) focus on Benghazi, that card has been taken off the table. It’s sad and unfair, but it’s a political reality.

So while one poll in Iowa does not an election make, today’s poll is part of a trend line that should make election observers take Sanders a bit more seriously as a contender. It’s high time they start at least pondering what a general election matchup pitting Sanders against any one of the current Republican candidates would look like.

They might be surprised at what they find.