Clinton and Trump neck-and-neck in latest CBS poll
By On July 25, 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 Democrats and Donald Trump for the GOP.
CBS poll results
Of those who replied, 44.0% said that they would vote for former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, while 43.0% said that they would give their vote to real estate developer Donald Trump.
The poll was conducted from July 22 to July 24. A total of 1118 respondents responded. The sampling error is +/-4.0 percentage points, which means that the poll results for both parties' candidates do not differ significantly.
Putting the results in context
Individual polls can include large errors, and should be treated with caution. Instead of trusting the results from single polls, research in forecasting recommends to look at combined polls or, even better, the combined PollyVote forecast that relies on different methods and data.
In order to make the results comparable to forecasts from benchmark methods, you can translate them into two-party vote shares. The respective figures are 49.4% for Clinton and 50.6% for Trump. For comparison: 50.0% was obtained by Clinton in the CBS poll on July 14, for Trump this number was only 50.0%.
Comparison to other polls
Looking at an average of polls, Trump's current two-party vote share is at 48.6%. This value is 2.0 percentage points lower than his respective numbers in the CBS poll. This margin is within the poll's sampling error, which means that the poll is not an outlier.
Results compared to the combined PollyVote forecast
The most recent PollyVote forecasts Trump to gain 47.9% of the two-party vote. Hence, Polly's forecast is 2.7 points below his polling numbers. Again, a look at the poll's error margin indicates that this difference is insignificant.
