New Bloomberg poll: Trump trails by a slight margin
By Bloomberg 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.
Bloomberg poll results
The poll was conducted from August 5 to August 8 with 749 respondents. There is a sampling error of +/-3.6 percentage points. Considering this error margin, the race is currently a statistical tie.
Putting the results in context
As any other method, polls are subject to bias. Thus, as a general rule, you should not have too much faith in the results of a single poll. Instead of trusting the results from single polls, we recommend to use combined polls or, even better, the combined PollyVote forecast that relies on forecasts from different methods, each of which draws upon different data.
To make the results comparable to benchmark forecasts, we convert them into shares of the two-party vote. This procedure yields figures of 53.2% for Clinton and 46.8% for Trump.
Results in comparison to other polls
Clinton can currently count on 53.2% of the major two-party vote in an average of recent polls. Clinton is currently at 53.2% of the major two-party vote in an average of recent polls. This value is 0 percentage points higher than respective numbers in the Bloomberg poll. This margin is within the poll's margin of error, which means that the poll is not an outlier.
The poll in comparison with PollyVote's prediction
The latest PollyVote foresees Clinton to gain 53.4% of the two-party vote. That is, Polly's prediction is 0.2 points above polling numbers. The PollyVote forecast is therefore in line with the poll's error margin.
