Clinton and Trump neck-and-neck in latest CNN poll
By Results of a new national poll administered by CNN were released on July 25. The poll asked participants for whom they would vote if the Democratic Party nominated Hillary Clinton and the Republicans nominated Donald Trump.
CNN poll results
Of those who replied, 48.0% said that they would vote for former First Lady Hillary Clinton, while 45.0% declared that they would give their vote to real estate developer Donald Trump.
The poll was conducted from July 22 to July 24 among 882 participants. There is a sampling error of +/-3.5 percentage points. Considering this error margin, the race is currently a statistical tie.
Putting the results in context
In general, however, don't have too much faith in the results of single polls, because they often contain large errors. At least, one should check how a poll's results compare to benchmark forecasts.
To make the results comparable to benchmark forecasts, we translate them into shares of the two-party vote. The respective figures are 48.4% for Clinton and 51.6% for Trump. For comparison: 53.9% was gained by Clinton in the CNN poll on July 17, for Trump this number was only 46.2%.
Results in comparison to other polls
Trump currently achieves 48.5% of the major two-party vote in an average of recent polls. This value is 3.1 percentage points lower than his corresponding numbers in the CNN poll. This deviation is within the poll's error margin, which means that the poll is not an outlier.
Comparison to the combined PollyVote
The latest PollyVote anticipates Trump to gain 47.9% of the two-party vote. That is, Polly's combined forecast is 3.7 points below his polling numbers. The PollyVote forecast is thus outside the poll's sampling error.
