Clinton hold narrow lead in CNN poll
By On June 22, CNN 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 Democrats and Donald Trump for the Republicans.
The results show that 47.0% of respondents plan to give their vote to former New York Senator Hillary Clinton, while 42.0% would vote for real estate developer Donald Trump.
The poll was conducted from June 16 to June 19. A total of 891 participants responded. The error margin is +/-3.5 percentage points, which means that the poll results for both candidates do not differ significantly.
Putting the results in context
In general, however, you should not have too much faith in the results of a single poll, as they sometimes incorporate large errors. Rather, one should examine whether the results from a single poll are comparable to benchmark forecasts.
For the following comparison, we convert Clinton's and Trump's raw poll numbers into shares of the two-party vote. This yields figures of 52.8% for Clinton and 47.2% for Trump. For comparison: 56.8% was gained by Clinton in the CNN poll on May 4, for Trump this number was only 43.2%.
Results compared to other polls
Clinton currently runs at 52.8% of the major two-party vote in an average of recent polls. This value is 0.0 percentage points lower than her respective numbers in the CNN poll. This margin is within the poll's margin of error, which suggests that the poll is not an outlier.
Comparison to the combined PollyVote
The latest PollyVote anticipates Clinton to gain 52.3% of the two-party vote. This means that the PollyVote is 0.5 points below her polling numbers. Again, a look at the poll's error margin shows that this deviation is negligible.
