Clinton leads by 8 points in new CBS poll
By On June 15, CBS released the results of a new national poll, in which respondents were asked for whom they would vote if the nominees were Hillary Clinton for the Democratic Party and Donald Trump for the GOP.
The results show that 43.0% of participants are going to to cast a ballot for former First Lady Hillary Clinton, while 37.0% are going to to cast a ballot for real estate developer Donald Trump.
The poll was conducted from June 9 to June 13. A total of 1048 respondents responded. The sampling error is +/-4.0 points. This means that the levels of voter support for the Democratic and the Republican candidate do not differ significantly.
Putting the results in context
As a general rule, however, one should not have too much faith in the results of an individual poll, because they can incorporate large errors. Instead of relying on results from single polls, you should look at aggregated polls or, even better, the combined PollyVote forecast that relies on forecasts from different methods, each of which relies on different data.
For the following analysis, we convert Clinton's and Trump's raw poll numbers into two-party vote shares. This yields figures of 53.8% for Clinton and 46.3% for Trump. On March 22 Clinton received 55.6% in the CBS poll and Trump received only 44.4%.
Comparison to other polls
Clinton can currently count on 53.0% of the major two-party vote according to the latest polling average. This value is 0.8 percentage points higher than her respective numbers in the CBS poll. This deviation is within the poll's margin of error, which suggests that the poll is not an outlier.
The poll in comparison with PollyVote's prediction
The latest PollyVote forecasts Clinton to gain 52.1% of the two-party vote. Hence, Polly's combined forecast is 1.7 points below her polling numbers. The PollyVote forecast is therefore within the poll's error margin.
