This mental fallacy explains who your friends are voting for in the primaries

For the past few weeks, my Facebook feed has turned into a peculiar kind of political battleground: My friends who support Hillary Clinton are duking it out with my friends who support Bernie Sanders. This much is unsurprising. After all, a lot of my friends are very political, and many make their living as pundits or political scientists. But one thing does strike me as odd about the conversations they're having: Nearly all of them think the candidate they like best also happens to have the best chance of beating the Republican nominee.

In fact, nearly all the Clinton supporters I know believe Sanders is too far out of the American political mainstream to win the general election. Meanwhile, nearly all the Sanders supporters retort in kind: They argue that the base isn't excited enough about Clinton to mobilize the core Democratic constituency, and that she is too disliked by moderates to win over a lot of swing voters.