Latest Morning Consult poll: Clinton trails by a slight margin
By Morning Consult published the results of a new national poll on July 31. In this poll, which was sponsored by Morning Consult, respondents were asked for whom they will vote: Republican nominee Donald Trump or Democrat nominee Hillary Clinton.
Morning Consult poll results
The results show that 27.0% of interviewees intend to vote for former New York Senator Hillary Clinton, while 32.0% intend to vote for real estate developer Donald Trump.
The Internet poll was in the field between July 29 and July 30. The sample size was 653 participants. The sampling error is +/-3.9 percentage points. This means that the levels of voter support for Trump and Clinton differ significantly.
Putting the results in context
As any other method, polls are subject to bias. Thus, as a general rule, you should not be too confident the results of an individual poll. Rather than trusting the results from single polls, research in forecasting recommends to look at combined polls or, even better, a combined forecast that includes different methods and data.
To make the results comparable to benchmark forecasts, you can translate them into shares of the two-party vote. This procedure yields values of 45.8% for Clinton and 54.2% for Trump. To compare: Only 43.1% was obtained by Clinton in the Morning Consult poll on July 26, for Trump this result was 56.9%.
Results in comparison to other polls
An average of recent polls has Trump at 48.4% of the two-party vote. This value is 5.8 percentage points lower than his corresponding numbers in the Morning Consult poll. This margin is outside the poll's error margin, which means that the poll is an outlier.
The poll in comparison with PollyVote's prediction
The current PollyVote anticipates Trump to gain 48.0% of the two-party vote. Hence, Polly's forecast is 6.2 points below his polling numbers. Again, a look at the poll's error margin reveals that this deviation is significant.
