New Rasmussen poll shows Clinton with 5-point lead
By Results of a new national poll administered by Rasmussen were circulated on June 9. The poll asked participants for whom they would vote if the Democrats nominated Hillary Clinton and the Republicans nominated Donald Trump.
The results show that 42.0% of participants plan to vote for former First Lady Hillary Clinton, whereas 38.0% would vote for billionaire Donald Trump.
This poll was conducted from June 6 to June 7, among a random sample of 1000 participants. If one accounts for the poll's margin of error of +/-3.0 percentage points, the results reflect a statistical tie.
Putting the results in context
Individual polls can contain substantial errors, which is why they should be interpreted with caution. Instead of trusting the results from single polls, forecasting research recommends to use aggregated polls or, even better, a combined forecast that relies on forecasts from different methods, each of which relies on different data.
For the following comparison, we translate Trump's and Clinton's raw poll numbers into two-party vote shares. This procedure results in values of 52.5% for Clinton and 47.5% for Trump. To compare: Only 50.7% was gained by Clinton in the Rasmussen poll on June 2, for Trump this number was 49.4%.
Comparison to other polls
Clinton currently runs at 52.4% of the two-party vote in an average of recent polls. Compared to her numbers in the Rasmussen poll, Clinton's polling average is 0.2 percentage points worse. This deviation is within the poll's sampling error, which means that the poll is not an outlier.
The poll in comparison with PollyVote's forecast
The latest PollyVote forecasts Clinton to gain 52.2% of the two-party vote. That is, Polly's forecast is 0.3 points below her polling numbers. Again, a look at the poll's sampling error suggests that this deviation is insignificant.
