New Reuters poll shows Trump behind by 5 points
By Reuters released the results of a new national poll, in which respondents were asked for whom they will vote: Republican nominee Donald Trump or Democrat nominee Hillary Clinton.
Reuters poll results
This poll was conducted from August 13 to August 17, among a random sample of 1049 participants. The error margin is +/-3.5 percentage points, which means that the poll results for the Democratic and the Republican candidate do not differ significantly.
Putting the results in context
In general, however, one should not have too much faith in the results of single polls, as they can incorporate large errors. Rather than relying on results from single polls, the best practice is to rely on combined polls or, even better, a combined forecast that uses different methods and data.
In order to make the results comparable to forecasts from other methods, you can translate them into shares of the two-party vote. This procedure yields values of 53.3% for Clinton and 46.8% for Trump.
Results in comparison to other polls
If we look at an average of polls, Clinton's current two-party vote share is at 53.1%. Relative to numbers in the Reuters poll Clinton's poll average is 0.3 percentage points lower. This deviation is within the poll's error margin, which means that the poll is not an outlier.
Comparison to the combined PollyVote
The most recent PollyVote predicts Clinton to gain 53.5% of the two-party vote. Hence, the PollyVote is 0.2 points above polling numbers. The PollyVote forecast is therefore within the poll's margin of error.
