By any measure, the three most likely people to appear on the November general election ballot are, in order, Hillary Clinton, Donald Trump and Ted Cruz.

And yet, according to new numbers from an NBC-Wall Street Journal national poll released Monday night, at least six in ten Americans say that they can’t see themselves supporting any of that trio.

Clinton’s numbers are the “best” on the question with 58 percent of people saying they don’t see themselves supporting her in the general election. (Forty one percent said they could see themselves backing her.) Sixty one percent of people say they can’t imagine backing Cruz while a whopping 68 percent say the same of Trump.

The only candidate running for president who has more people saying they could support him than saying they wouldn’t? Bernie Sanders, who is at 49 percent support/48 percent can’t support in the NBC-WSJ poll.

What gives? A few things.

First, we have reached the “sick of it all” stage of the presidential primaries on both sides. Both races have been going on, very actively, for more than a year. That’s WAY longer than the average person is interested in paying attention to politics.

We tend to like our politics for a few months in the beginning and at the end of a presidential year. Not for the entire year. Familiarity breeds contempt in all things including politics. Voters have just seen too much of Clinton, Trump and Cruz. If all three candidates totally disappeared for two months and then we asked this same poll question my guess is many more people would be willing to vote for them.That, of course, isn’t going to happen. Sorry!

Second, there’s still a sense in the electorate of can’t-somebody-else-do-it-ism. As in, they don’t love their choices and still wonder if someone like Joe Biden or Paul Ryan might somehow ride in and be the candidate of their dreams. It’s the effect fantasy sports have had on our brains. We are perennially dissatisfied with our current team and are always angling for some way to build a super team (or candidate).

Those angles almost never pan out, of course, and then we make peace with the team we have. Once Clinton and Trump/Cruz formally become their parties’s respective nominees, some — but not all — of that pining for the thing that we can’t have will go away.

Third, people really, truly, hate politics. So, the people who are identified as the leading politicians — even Trump who is running as the anti-politician — are seen as the practitioners of a craft that the average person loathes. It’s also in keeping with a broader dissatisfaction about life in general; just one in four people in the NBC-WSJ poll believe the country is headed in the right direction while 70 percent believe it is off on the wrong track. It’s been three and a half years in NBC-WSJ polling since more than one in three people said the country was headed in the right direction.

Since election tend to be binary choices, the electorate is almost certainly going to have to pull the lever for one of these three people come November. (They may have three choices if Trump isn’t the Republican nominee and decides to run as an independent.) Given how unappealing the prospect of voting for any of the trio is — and how unlikely it is to significantly improve any time soon — the general election race will almost certainly be a battle to the bottom, an epic struggle to be only slightly less bad than the other guy or woman.

That means a deeply negative campaign by two nominees who understand that they will never convince voters to be for them so they need to persuade them to be (more) against the other person.

Only 203 days until the election!

(c) 2016, The Washington Post · Chris Cillizza