New NBC News poll has Trump trailing by 8 points

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

The poll was carried out from August 15 to August 21 among 1745 participants. There is a sampling error of +/-1.1 percentage points. Considering this error margin, the race is currently a statistical tie.

Putting the results in context

Individual polls can incorporate substantial errors, which is why they should be interpreted with caution. Instead of relying on results from single polls, the best practice is to consult combined polls or, even better, a combined forecast that incorporates forecasts from different methods, each of which draws upon different data.

For the following analysis, we convert the candidates' raw poll numbers into two-party vote shares. This procedure results in values of 54.4% for Clinton and 45.7% for Trump. On August 22 Clinton received 55.0% in the NBC News poll and Trump received only 45.1%.

Results in comparison to other polls

An average of recent polls sees Clinton at 53.1% of the two-party vote. Compared to numbers in the NBC News poll Clinton's poll average is 1.3 percentage points lower. This difference is outside the poll's error margin, which suggests that the poll is an outlier.

Results compared to the combined PollyVote forecast

The most recent PollyVote forecasts Clinton to gain 53.5% of the two-party vote. That is, the PollyVote is 0.9 points below polling numbers. Again, a look at the poll's error margin reveals that this deviation is negligible.

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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