Clinton leads by 8 points in latest ABC News poll
By ABC News published the results of a new national poll. In this poll, respondents were asked for whom they will vote: Democrat Hillary Clinton or Republican Donald Trump.
ABC News poll results
The poll was conducted from August 1 to August 4. A total of 815 respondents responded. The sampling error is +/-4.0 points. This means that the poll results for the candidates of both parties do not differ significantly.
Putting the results in context
As any other method, polls are subject to bias. Hence, one should not focus too much on the results of an individual poll. Rather than trusting the results from single polls, the evidence-based approach is to rely on combined polls or, even better, the combined PollyVote forecast that includes forecasts from different methods, each of which draws upon different data.
To make the results comparable to benchmark forecasts, you can convert them into two-party vote shares. This yields figures of 54.4% for Clinton and 45.7% for Trump.
Results vs. other polls
Clinton can currently count on 53.1% of the major two-party vote in an average of recent polls. This value is 1.4 percentage points lower than corresponding numbers in the ABC News poll. This difference is within the poll's margin of error, which suggests that the poll is not an outlier.
The poll in comparison with PollyVote's forecast
The current PollyVote foresees Clinton to gain 53.5% of the two-party vote. That is, the PollyVote forecast is 0.9 points below polling numbers. Again, a look at the poll's margin of error reveals that this difference is insignificant.
