Dead heat between Clinton and Trump in latest Rasmussen poll
By Rasmussen published the results of a new national poll on July 7. In this poll, respondents were asked for whom they would vote if Hillary Clinton were the Democratic Party's candidate and Donald Trump were the Republican Party's candidate.
Rasmussen poll results
The results show that 40.0% of participants said that they would give their vote to former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, whereas 42.0% are going to vote for billionaire Donald Trump.
This poll was conducted from July 5 to July 5, among a random sample of 1000 participants. There is a sampling error of +/-3.0 percentage points. Considering this error margin, the race is currently a statistical tie.
Putting the results in context
As any other method, polls are subject to bias. Thus, as a general rule, don't be too confident the results of an individual poll. Instead of relying on results from single polls, you should use combined polls or, even better, a combined forecast that relies on different methods and data.
In order to make the results comparable to forecasts from benchmark methods, one can convert them into two-party vote shares. The respective figures are 48.8% for Clinton and 51.2% for Trump. In the latest Rasmussen poll on June 30 Clinton received only 47.6%, while Trump received 52.4%.
Comparison to other polls
Trump currently achieves 47.2% of the major two-party vote according to an average of recent polls. In comparison to his numbers in the Rasmussen poll Trump's poll average is 4.0 percentage points worse. This deviation is outside the poll's sampling error, which suggests that the poll is an outlier.
Results compared to the combined PollyVote prediction
The current PollyVote anticipates Trump to gain 47.5% of the two-party vote. That is, the PollyVote is 3.7 points below his polling numbers. Again, a look at the poll's margin of error suggests that this difference is significant.
