Trump leads by 14 points in new Morning Consult poll
By Morning Consult published the results of a new national poll on July 26. In this poll, which was sponsored by Morning Consult, participants were asked for whom they will vote: Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump.
Morning Consult poll results
Of those who answered the question, 25.0% said that they are going to vote for former New York Senator Hillary Clinton, whereas 33.0% said that they would give their vote to billionaire Donald Trump.
The poll was conducted via Internet from July 22 to July 24 among 876 participants. If one takes into account the poll's sampling error of +/-3.4 percentage points, the gap in voter support is statistically significant.
Putting the results in context
As any other method, polls are subject to bias. Thus, as a general rule, a good strategy is to not focus too much on the results of a single poll. Rather than trusting the results from single polls, forecasting research recommends to rely on 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 convert them into shares of the two-party vote. This procedure yields figures of 43.1% for Clinton and 56.9% for Trump. On July 25 Clinton obtained 47.6% in the Morning Consult poll and Trump obtained only 52.4%.
Results compared to other polls
An average of recent polls has Trump at 49.6% of the two-party vote. This value is 7.3 percentage points lower than his corresponding numbers in the Morning Consult poll. This deviation is outside the poll's margin of error, which means that the poll is an outlier.
Results compared to the combined PollyVote forecast
The latest PollyVote predicts Trump to gain 48.1% of the two-party vote. Hence, Polly's forecast is 8.8 points below his polling numbers. The PollyVote forecast is thus outside the poll's sampling error.
