Dead heat between Trump and Clinton in latest NBC/SurveyMonkey poll
By Results of a new national poll conducted by NBC/SurveyMonkey and sponsored by NBC/SurveyMonkey were released. The poll asked interviewees for whom they will vote: Democrat Hillary Clinton or Republican Donald Trump.
NBC/SurveyMonkey poll results
The results show that 46.0% of participants are going to give their vote to former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, while 45.0% would vote for businessman Donald Trump.
The poll was conducted via Internet from July 18 to July 24 among 12931 participants. Considering the poll's error margin of +/-0.9 percentage points, the gap between both candidates is statistically significant.
Putting the results in context
Single polls should be interpreted with caution, because they can incorporate large errors. Instead of trusting the results from single polls, the best practice is to consult combined polls or, even better, a combined forecast that includes forecasts from different methods, each of which includes different data.
For the following comparison, we convert Trump's and Clinton's raw poll numbers into shares of the two-party vote. This procedure yields values of 48.8% for Clinton and 51.3% for Trump.
Comparison to other polls
Trump is currently at 49.7% of the two-party vote according to an average of recent polls. This value is 1.7 percentage points lower than his respective numbers in the NBC/SurveyMonkey poll. This difference is outside the poll's margin of error, which means that the poll is an outlier.
Comparison to the combined PollyVote
The current PollyVote forecasts Trump to gain 48.1% of the two-party vote. Hence, the PollyVote forecast is 3.2 points below his polling numbers. Again, a look at the poll's error margin suggests that this difference is significant.
