Morning Consult poll: Clinton trails by 5 points
By Morning Consult published the results of a new national poll on August 1. In this poll, which was conducted on behalf of Morning Consult, interviewees were asked for whom they will vote: Republican nominee Donald Trump or Democrat nominee Hillary Clinton.
Morning Consult poll results
Of those who replied, 27.0% said that they would vote for former First Lady Hillary Clinton, whereas 32.0% declared that they would give their vote to businessman Donald Trump.
The poll was conducted from July 29 to July 30 via Internet. A total of 653 respondents responded. The error margin is +/-3.9 percentage points. This means that the levels of voter support for Trump and Clinton differ significantly.
Putting the results in context
Individual polls should be interpreted with caution, since they often contain substantial biases. Rather than relying on results from single polls, the best practice scientific advice is to use 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 other methods, we convert them into two-party vote shares. This procedure yields figures of 45.8% for Clinton and 54.2% for Trump.
Results vs. other polls
An average of recent polls sees Trump at 48.4% of the two-party vote. In comparison to his numbers in the Morning Consult poll Trump's poll average is 5.8 percentage points lower. This deviation is outside the poll's margin of error, which suggests that the poll is an outlier.
The poll compared with PollyVote's prediction
The current PollyVote foresees Trump to gain 48.0% of the two-party vote. This means that Polly's prediction is 6.2 points below his polling numbers. Again, a look at the poll's margin of error reveals that this deviation is significant.
