Primary results have nothing to do with the "best chance at winning an election"...the general election polls would at least be a hint as to what could happen and Sanders is favored over Clinton by a mile against Republican opponents.
Honestly, peddling the illogical notion that primary support translates to the general election quality of a candidate would mean that Trump is the strongest GOP candidate imaginable this cycle. He has earned just over 10,000,000 votes. Romney almost earned 61,000,000 in the general election. In other words, there's 51,000,000 people left in his own party that he would need to sway to his side to just match Romney's five million vote loss.
It would be interesting to go back and adjust all of the states that already voted based on Sanders' current nationwide support in polling. Makes you wonder if he could have done it with an extra month or two to ramp up his name recognition. Mathematically, there's clearly people that already voted Clinton and have switched sides or didn't bother to vote at all and ended up supporting Sanders after he'd gone through their states.
Based on early voting patterns in the past, I'd say at least 1-2 million votes cast for Clinton have been from people who never even had the chance to hear about Sanders until it was too late and they'd already submitted their vote-by-mail ballots. Sanders would often start showing up in states a week before the "day of voting" yet plenty of those states had already been allowing people to mail in their ballots for weeks. This would also help explain part of the reason why he did so well in caucus states as nobody can actually vote early in them. You can't say those voters "chose" Clinton when they merely checked a box before there was even a debate in their minds about the two candidates. To these people (likely older voters since they prefer to vote-by-mail and wouldn't be on the internet to hear about Sanders 24/7), Bernie was merely just some no name candidate in an election that was preordained for Clinton. They had no idea that a competitive race was being run, and even if they did, they knew next to nothing about Sanders as he hadn't made any in state appearances or advertisements until weeks after they had submitted their ballots.
Case in point? The friggin' nationwide polling between Clinton and Sanders. Had Sanders been able to have that level of support from the start, he probably would have won this thing due to extra dedicated followers and absolutely crushing Clinton in caucus states.
This article basically explains it all...2/3 of voters in Florida had basically made up their minds before the primaries had even really got out of Iowa...no Sanders appearances or ads yet whatsoever.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/seth-...bernie-sanders-for-a-month-now_b_9567212.html