Reuters poll: Clinton holds negligible advantage

Results of a new national poll carried out by Reuters were circulated. The poll asked interviewees for whom they will vote: Republican Donald Trump or Democrat Hillary Clinton.

The poll was carried out between July 30 and August 3. The sample size was 1072 participants. Given the poll's margin of error of +/-3.5 percentage points, the results reflect a statistical tie.

Putting the results in context

Individual polls can contain substantial biases, and should be interpreted with caution. Rather, one should examine how a poll's results compare to benchmark forecasts.

For the following analysis, we convert Trump's and Clinton's raw poll numbers into two-party vote shares. This yields figures of 52.4% for Clinton and 47.6% for Trump.

Results in comparison to other polls

When compared to the average results of other polls Clinton performed worse with 3.3 percentage points, while Trump did better with 3.3 percentage points. This margin is outside the poll's margin of error, which suggests that the poll is an outlier.

Comparison to the combined PollyVote

The most recent PollyVote predicts Clinton to gain 52.8% and Trump 47.2% of the two-party vote. Clinton has 0.4 percentage points less and Trump has 0.4 percentage points more when the results of the poll are compared to the combined PollyVote forecast. Again, a look at the poll's sampling error suggests that this deviation is significant.

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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