FOX poll: Trump trails by 7 points
By On June 29, FOX 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 Republicans.
According to the results, 44.0% of participants plan to vote for former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, while 38.0% plan to vote for billionaire Donald Trump.
The poll was carried out from June 26 to June 28 with 1017 respondents. The margin of error is +/-3.0 percentage points, which means that the poll results for the candidates of both parties differ significantly.
Putting the results in context
Single polls should be interpreted with caution, as they may incorporate substantial biases. At the very least, one should check how a poll’s results compare to benchmark forecasts.
For the following analysis, we convert Trump’s and Clinton’s raw poll numbers into shares of the two-party vote. This procedure yields figures of 53.7% for Clinton and 46.3% for Trump. To compare: Only 51.9% was gained by Clinton in the FOX poll on June 9, for Trump this number was 48.2%.
Comparison to other polls
An average of recent polls has Clinton at 53.2% of the two-party vote. This value is 0.5 percentage points lower than her respective numbers in the FOX poll. This difference is within the poll’s sampling error, which suggests that the poll is not an outlier.
Comparison to the combined PollyVote
The latest PollyVote forecasts Clinton to gain 52.0% of the two-party vote. Hence, the combined PollyVote is 1.7 points below her polling numbers. Again, a look at the poll’s error margin shows that this difference is negligible.
