A top Republican pollster predicted that Sen. Bernie Sanders' strong showing against President Trump in head-to-head polling will likely not hold up.
"If you sent the senior officials of the Trump campaign off for a weekend retreat with the goal of conjuring up the ideal opponent for Donald Trump, they'd come out on Monday morning with Bernie Sanders," Whit Ayres, founder and president of North Star Opinion Research, said on Fox Nation's "What Are The Odds?"
The RealClearPolitics average of polls that show a hypothetical Sanders Trump general election matchup have Sanders ahead 50 percent to Trump's 45 percent.
"The Trump campaign has not yet leveled its guns on Bernie Sanders," Ayres observed, adding he believes the self-described democratic socialist's number will decline.
Fox Nation host and Fox News contributor Kristen Soltis Anderson raised another poll that may be a warning sign for the Sanders' campaign.
A recent Wall Street Journal/NBC poll, conducted Feb. 14-17, showed that 67 percent of voters said they would be uncomfortable with a socialist candidate for president, 57 percent said the same of a candidate who suffered a heart attack, and 53 percent would be uncomfortable with someone age 75 or older. (Sanders is 78.)
"The guy is all of those things you said," said Ayres, "Plus, a guy who has repeatedly praised communist dictators, be they Fidel Castro in Cuba, [Daniel Ortega] in Nicaragua -- or the Soviet Union where he spent his honeymoon. A lot of people don't know all those things."
"It's hard for me to believe that Bernie Sanders can withstand the kind of barrage that's going to come at him," he concluded.
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