It’s just one survey, and a survey taken in the atypical window of Donald Trump’s impeachment trial, but the results of the latest NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll are still instructive. If we were to take this poll as gospel, we could reach some conclusions about Trump’s chances for reelection and who presents him with the biggest threat.

Looking at the overall results, Republican pollster Bill McInturff of Public Opinion Strategies described it as Trump’s best NBC/WSJ poll in three years, and that’s largely attributable to an increase in the intensity of his support. While that intensity is currently at a high point with his base feeling defensive about his possible removal from office, the bottom line is that he doesn’t look weakened by the impeachment saga. The bottom didn’t fall out, and it’s hard to see how anything could cause it to fall out short of a new recession.

Yet, he’s still trailing nationally against Joe Biden, Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren and Pete Buttigieg. Thing look murkier when the sample is limited to 11 battleground states. The margins shrink for Biden and Sanders, and Warren and Buttigieg actually trail. At face value, this means all of the leading Democrats would win the popular vote, but only Biden and Sanders would win the Electoral College.  Of the four, only Biden is leading in the battleground states outside of the survey’s 3.1 percent margin of error.

As I’ve explained repeatedly over the last four years, the Democrats dependence on suburban voters is their Achilles heel. Nowhere is this more evident than in the polling of capitalism vs. socialism.

Fifty-two percent of all voters say they have a positive view of capitalism, versus 18 percent who have a negative opinion.

The numbers are reversed for socialism, with 53 percent having a negative view and 19 percent a positive one.

Yet there’s a striking difference by party and age.

Democratic primary voters have a net-positive impression of socialism (40 percent positive, 23 percent negative), and Dem voters ages 18-34 view it even more favorably (51 percent to 14 percent).

But key general-election groups like independents (-45 net rating), suburban voters and swing-state voters have a much more negative impression of socialism.

If you set aside your personal feelings about capitalism vs. socialism and approach this as an analyst, it’s easy to see why Warren and particularly Sanders are risky candidates. They are weak in the wrong places. The surest way to lose this election is to underperform in the suburbs and fail to run up the overwhelming numbers needed to offset Trump’s rural advantage in battleground states. This could be offset in only three ways, and one of them, winning over independents, is not going to be easy when they have a -45 net opinion of socialism. Another way to offset the rural advantage is to boost turnout in the cities and especially among racial minorities, but Sanders and Warren run weakest with this segment of the Democratic base. The final way is to eat into Trump’s rural support, and that’s what Sanders and Warren would have to do. I believe they both have the potential to accomplish this, but at the cost of suburban support and possibly depressed enthusiasm in the cities. Their true strength is with the youth vote, and that could give them a boost in almost every area of the country. Still, the overall picture is a giant red blinking danger sign.

That perception is backed by other numbers, too.

Still, 49 percent of all voters say they are “very uncomfortable” about Trump when it comes to his re-election bid in 2020.

That’s compared with 43 percent who are “very uncomfortable” with Sanders, 36 percent with Warren and 35 percent with Biden.

If we consider the “very uncomfortable” number as a proxy for the likelihood a voter will vote for Trump despite misgivings, or sit things out because they hate both of their choices, we can see an echo of the socialism numbers.

There’s a danger that you’ll find what you’re expecting to find in survey results, but this is most definitely what I expected the public to say based on my diagnosis of the 2016 election. It’s why I begged the Democrats not to double-down on the suburban strategy just because it was easy. The surest way to lose in 2020 is to build a coalition around an urban/suburban consensus and then nominate someone whose best potential is on college campuses and potentially in rural areas where the overall polarization of the suburban strategy has made it hard to break through.

Ironically, a successful economically populist/progressive candidate actually needs white working class voters. They don’t need to win a majority with them, but they have to be competitive. A Democratic Party that is reliant on the suburbs is not built to win on a Democratic/Socialist platform, or even a left-wing Democratic one.

The result is that even a very unpopular Trump who has been bleeding support and congressional seats in the suburbs could be reelected precisely because he doesn’t lose badly enough in the areas surrounding Philadelphia, Charlotte, Atlanta, Tampa, Cleveland, Detroit, and Milwaukee. Another popular vote drubbing coupled with an Electoral College win then becomes very possible.

It seems to me that the Democrats are at risk of making two potentially fatal mistakes. The first is to chase the easy winnings Trump offered by alienating the suburbs rather than seeking to stem or even reverse this polarization, and the second is to nominate a candidate who wants to remake the electorate in exactly that way after the party failed to do any of the prep work.

The future of the party is written all over these poll numbers, with Democratic voters aged 18-34 having a 51 percent to 14 percent positive opinion of socialism. But 2020 is the present, not the future. Everything is riding on the Democrats winning the suburbs by staggering margins, and the party would be crazy to run a candidate whose policies make nearly half of suburbanites “very uncomfortable.”

I did not want the suburban strategy precisely because I favor a more economically populist/socialist platform. But my advice wasn’t followed, so now I have to warn against thinking it’s safe to pursue that platform this year.

Having said that, if I had to vote today, I’d probably still go for Warren simply because she has the best chance of threading the needle and holding the suburbs while offering good policy that can also cut into Trump’s advantages in his areas of strength. But I simply can’t commit to her because her missteps have me worried that her upside simply cannot pass a simple risk/benefit test.