New YouGov poll: Clinton at 52%, Trump at 48.1%
By YouGov published the results of a new national poll on July 18. In this poll, which was commissioned by Economist, participants 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.
YouGov poll results
The results show that 40.0% of participants indicated that they would give their vote to former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, whereas 37.0% indicated that they would give their vote to real estate developer Donald Trump.
The poll was conducted via Internet from July 15 to July 17. 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
Individual polls can contain substantial biases, which is why they should be interpreted with caution. Instead of relying on results from single polls, forecasting research recommends to rely on combined polls or, even better, the combined PollyVote forecast that includes forecasts from different methods, each of which draws upon different data.
In order to make the results comparable to forecasts from benchmark methods, we convert them into two-party vote shares. The resulting figures are 52.0% for Clinton and 48.1% for Trump. For comparison: Only 50.6% was obtained by Clinton in the YouGov poll on March 14, for Trump this number was 49.4%.
Comparison to other polls
Looking at an average of polls, Clinton's two-party vote share is currently at 52.3%. This value is 0.3 percentage points higher than her respective numbers in the YouGov poll. This margin is within the poll's sampling error, which means that the poll is not an outlier.
Comparison to the combined PollyVote
The most recent PollyVote expects Clinton to gain 52.5% of the two-party vote. Hence, Polly's combined forecast is 0.5 points above her polling numbers. The PollyVote forecast is therefore in line with the poll's margin of error.
