Latest NBC News poll: Trump trails by a comfortable margin

NBC News published the results of a new national poll. In this poll, interviewees were asked for whom they will vote: Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump.

The poll was carried out between August 15 and August 21. The sample size was 1745 participants. If one accounts for the poll's error margin of +/-1.1 percentage points, the results reflect a statistical tie.

Putting the results in context

As any other method, polls are subject to bias. As a result, a good strategy is to not have too much faith in the results of a single poll. Instead of trusting the results from single polls, one should look at combined polls or, even better, the combined PollyVote forecast that includes forecasts from different methods, each of which draws upon different data.

For the following analysis, we convert Clinton's and Trump's raw poll numbers into shares of the two-party vote. The resulting figures are 54.4% for Clinton and 45.7% for Trump.

Results in comparison to other polls

An average of recent polls sees Clinton at 53.3% of the two-party vote. Clinton is currently at 53.3% of the two-party vote in an average of recent polls. This value is 1.2 percentage points lower than respective numbers in the NBC News poll. This difference is within the poll's sampling error, which suggests that the poll is not an outlier.

Comparison to the combined PollyVote

The current PollyVote foresees Clinton to gain 53.4% of the two-party vote. That is, Polly's prediction is 1.0 point below polling numbers. The PollyVote forecast is therefore in line with 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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