MSNBC’s data guy Steve Kornacki took a look at the polling a few days ago that I think addresses some of the weirdness we’re seeing with the national polls and the election results. Donald Trump is winning his primaries handily and has a virtual lock on the Republican presidential nomination — but a common interpretation of the results says that he is also exhibiting profound weaknesses among independents that portend dire general election consequences. But there’s a hitch. A look at general election polling reveals a completely different story among independent voters — and a dive into all the other data we have on the 2024 presidential race shows why Trump’s poor independent numbers in the primary and better performance in general election polls are completely consistent with each other. The short answer: These are two very different groups of voters. First, the evidence for Trump’s weakness among independents voting in this year’s GOP primaries is straightforward. Despite the widely acknowledged — even by his critics — inevitability of his nomination, Trump is still losing around 40% of the vote in Republican contests. And he’s getting crushed among independents, a group that looms large in November. From exit polling data, here’s how bad Trump’s numbers have been with them so far (note that exit polls weren’t conducted in Michigan): But the recent NBC News poll paints a very different picture among independent general election voters: For context, Trump lost the independent vote to President Joe Biden in 2020 by a…