New Raba Research poll: Clinton holds healthy advantage
By Raba Research published the results of a new national poll on July 26. In this poll, which was sponsored by Raba Research, interviewees were asked for whom they will vote: Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump.
Raba Research poll results
Of those who answered the question, 39.0% said that they are going to vote for former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, while 34.0% indicated that they would give their vote to businessman Donald Trump.
The poll was conducted via Internet from July 22 to July 22 among 909 likely voters. Considering the poll's error margin of +/-3.3 percentage points, the gap in voter support is statistically significant.
Putting the results in context
As a general rule, however, don't have too much faith in the results of single polls, as they sometimes contain large errors. Rather than relying on results from single polls, we recommend to use combined polls or, even better, the combined PollyVote forecast that draws upon different methods and data.
For the following analysis, we translate the candidates' raw poll numbers into two-party vote shares. This procedure results in figures of 53.4% for Clinton and 46.6% for Trump. For comparison: 58.6% was obtained by Clinton in the Raba Research poll on July 12, for Trump this number was only 41.4%.
Results in comparison to other polls
Looking at an average of polls, Clinton's two-party vote share is currently at 50.4%. This value is 3.0 percentage points lower than her corresponding numbers in the Raba Research poll. This difference is within the poll's error margin, which suggests that the poll is not an outlier.
The poll compared with PollyVote's forecast
The most recent PollyVote expects Clinton to gain 51.9% of the two-party vote. That is, the PollyVote is 1.5 points below her polling numbers. The PollyVote forecast is therefore in line with the poll's margin of error.
