Each week, Nate Cohn, The Upshot’s elections analyst, and Toni Monkovic, an Upshot editor, will discuss the 2016 race and post a lightly edited transcript of their written exchange.

Toni We’re going to hear about this all the way to the convention, and most likely during the convention — maybe even after the convention: Bernie Sanders does better than Hillary Clinton in polling against Donald Trump. But it’s not nearly so simple.

Nate No, it’s not. There are basically two reasons.

One is that Bernie Sanders’s supporters are a big reason Clinton is doing worse in her polling against Trump. In the recent YouGov poll, Clinton had just a 40-point lead against Trump among Sanders voters, while Sanders had a 70-point lead. Trump was getting virtually the same share of the vote against both candidates — 40 percent against Clinton, 39 percent against Sanders. Presumably most Sanders supporters will ultimately get behind Clinton, and, on the flip side, Clinton supporters would have been much more negative on Sanders if he had posed a more serious threat to her victory.

The second thing is that Sanders just hasn’t faced any major attacks on his record. The Republicans have cheered him on against Clinton, whom they realize they’re inevitably going to face. Clinton never really attacked him, either — no big negative television ad buys, for example — in no small part because she didn’t want to alienate his supporters.