Nate Silver's Trump stuff was arbitrary guessing based on how Trump would fare as the cycle progressed. It had absolutely nothing to do with polling and the chances they assigned the candidates was completely subjective.
Also, you don't opt to receive polling questions. I get called from polling firms on my
cellphone and I didn't opt in.
Your argument basically boils down to "polls are meaningless because Clinton
surely would do better than Sanders in the general election." You would be citing those same polls as evidence of Clinton's strength were they showing a different outcome.
Why not for a second entertain the notion, that maybe, just maybe, the country prefers him to Clinton? Are the favorability ratings also nonsense in your mind too, even though the 50% cutoff tends to determine if a President is re-elected or not?
And again, he has had millions of people not affiliated with either party vote for him in open primaries or register as a Democrat for closed ones. Millions of people that have no intention, at least at this point, of voting for Clinton. Don't you think the person that can bring in a few extra million along with the guaranteed 60 million or so votes for the Democratic nominee in November would fare better than the one who can't? Clinton's supporters in the primary are virtually all lifelong Democrats that aren't going to say no to Bernie if he's the nominee (and they generally like him given his high favorables within party polling). In other words, she brings in nobody new and Sanders does, hence Sanders doing better in all of these polls. I don't know what's so hard to understand about it and it's those same non-Democrats that she is now targeting and those are the same voters that analysis sites like FiveThirtyEight are referring to as ones she'll want to pick up that aren't guaranteed to vote for her.
The simple equation for the umpteenth time:
Every registered Democrat that votes in the fall votes for Clinton (x) and she gets x amount of votes.
Every registered Democrat that votes in the fall votes for nominee Sanders (x) along with the millions of independent voters that supported him in the primaries
. He gets x + y amount of votes.
The rest of the news media, pollsters and analysts have no problem seeing that and realizing why it explains Sanders faring better in these head-to-head polls. It's just people in this thread that can't see it.
Fair enough to make the argument that things would change if Sanders were the nominee because he could get attacked a certain way (keep in mind, an opinion rather than a fact). But as it stands
right at this very moment, the above line of reasoning is pretty much on the nose. Democrats will vote for a Democrat (and Sanders even has a higher favorable rating within his own party than Clinton...) and Sanders also gets a bunch of non-democrats. Fact.