New Morning Consult poll has Clinton trailing by 6 points
Morning Consult released the results of a new national poll, in which respondents were asked for whom they will vote: Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump.
Morning Consult poll results
The poll was conducted via Internet from August 18 to August 20 among 2001 participants. If one takes into account the poll's margin of error of +/-2.2 percentage points, the spread between both candidates is statistically significant.
Putting the results in context
Individual polls should be treated with caution, as they can include large errors. Rather than trusting the results from single polls, the best practice scientific advice is to use 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 comparison, we translate the candidates' raw poll numbers into two-party vote shares. The corresponding figures are 46.3% for Clinton and 53.7% for Trump.
Results vs. other polls
Trump is currently at 47.0% of the two-party vote according to an average of recent polls. Compared to numbers in the Morning Consult poll Trump's poll average is 6.7 percentage points lower. This difference is outside the poll's error margin, which means that the poll is an outlier.
Comparison to the combined PollyVote
The current PollyVote expects Trump to gain 46.5% of the two-party vote. Hence, Polly's forecast is 7.2 points below polling numbers. Again, a look at the poll's sampling error shows that this difference is significant.