New Rasmussen poll: Clinton and Trump in a virtual tie
By Results of a new national poll carried out by Rasmussen and commissioned by Rasmussen were circulated on July 28. The poll asked respondents for whom they will vote: Democrat Hillary Clinton or Republican Donald Trump.
Rasmussen poll results
Of those who answered the question, 43.0% said that they will vote for former First Lady Hillary Clinton, while 42.0% said that they would give their vote to businessman Donald Trump.
The poll was in the field between July 26 and July 27. The sample size was 1000 likely voters. Taking into account the poll's margin of error of +/-3.2 percentage points, the results reflect a statistical tie.
Putting the results in context
As any other method, polls are subject to bias. Thus, as a general rule, don't have too much faith in the results of a single poll. Rather than trusting the results from single polls, the best practice scientific advice is to rely on combined polls or, even better, a combined forecast that relies on forecasts from different methods, each of which draws upon different data.
In order to make the results comparable to forecasts from benchmark methods, one can translate them into shares of the two-party vote. This procedure yields figures of 50.6% for Clinton and 49.4% for Trump. To compare: Only 49.4% was gained by Clinton in the Rasmussen poll on July 21, for Trump this number was 50.6%.
Results compared to other polls
Looking at an average of polls, Clinton's current two-party vote share is at 50.6%. The values are thus identical to the average results of other polls. This difference is within the poll's margin of error, which suggests that the poll is not an outlier.
Comparison to the combined PollyVote
The current PollyVote foresees Clinton to gain 51.9% of the two-party vote. This means that the PollyVote forecast is 1.3 points above her polling numbers. Again, a look at the poll's sampling error indicates that this difference is negligible.
