New CBS poll: Clinton and Trump in a dead heat

CBS published the results of a new national poll on August 1. In this poll, interviewees were asked for whom they will vote: Republican nominee Donald Trump or Democrat nominee Hillary Clinton.

The results show that 43.0% of participants would cast a ballot for former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, while 44.0% plan to vote for real estate developer Donald Trump.

The poll was in the field between July 22 and July 24. The sample size was 1118 participants. There is a sampling error of +/-4.0 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. Hence, you should not have too much faith in the results of an individual poll. Rather, one should examine how a poll's results compare to benchmark forecasts.

To make the results comparable to benchmark forecasts, we translate them into two-party vote shares. The resulting figures are 49.4% for Clinton and 50.6% for Trump.

Comparison to other polls

If we look at an average of polls, Trump's current two-party vote share is at 48.5%. This value is 2.1 percentage points lower than his respective numbers in the CBS poll. This margin is within the poll's sampling error, which means that the poll is not an outlier.

Comparison to the combined PollyVote

The latest PollyVote predicts Trump to gain 48.0% of the two-party vote. This means that the PollyVote is 2.6 points below his polling numbers. The PollyVote forecast is thus within the poll's error margin.

This article was automatically generated by the PollyBot, which uses algorithms developed by AX Semantics to generate text from data stored in our API. The exact dataset underlying this particular article can be found here.

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