Clinton tied with Trump in new Ipsos/Reuters poll
By Results of a new national poll conducted by Ipsos/Reuters and sponsored by Ipsos/Reuters were circulated on July 29. The poll asked interviewees for whom they will vote: Donald·Trump or Hillary·Clinton.
Ipsos/Reuters poll results
According to the results, the two candidates can draw on identical levels of support, each with 37.0% of the vote.
The poll was conducted via Internet from July 25 to July 29 among 1433 likely voters. There is a sampling error of +/-2.6 percentage points. Considering this error margin, the race is currently a statistical tie.
Putting the results in context
As any other method, polls are subject to bias. In general, don't focus too much on the results of an individual poll. At the very least, one should check how a poll's results compare to benchmark forecasts.
For the following comparison, we translate Trump's and Clinton's raw poll numbers into shares of the two-party vote. The results of the actual poll mean 50.0 % for Clinton and 50.0 % for Trump in the two-party vote share. To compare: Only 30.4% was gained by Clinton in the Ipsos/Reuters poll on July 27, for Trump this result was 69.6%.
Comparison to other polls
When compared to the average results of other polls Clinton performed worse with 0.7 percentage points, while Trump did better with 0.7 percentage points. This margin is outside the poll's sampling error, which suggests that the poll is an outlier.
The poll compared with PollyVote's prediction
The most recent PollyVote predicts Clinton to gain 51.9% and Trump 48.1% of the two-party vote. Clinton has 1.9 percentage points less and Trump has 1.9 percentage points more when the results of the poll are compared to the combined PollyVote forecast. The PollyVote forecast is thus outside the poll's error margin.
