New NBC/SurveyMonkey poll: Clinton trails by a steady margin

NBC/SurveyMonkey released the results of a new national poll, in which respondents were asked for whom they will vote: Democrat Hillary Clinton or Republican Donald Trump.

The Internet poll was conducted from August 15 to August 21 with 17459 participants. The margin of error is +/-0.8 percentage points. This means that the levels of voter support for the two candidates differ significantly.

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 confidence in the results of a single poll. At least, one should check how a poll's results compare to benchmark forecasts.

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

Results vs. other polls

An average of recent polls sees Trump at 47.1% of the two-party vote. In comparison to numbers in the NBC/SurveyMonkey poll Trump's poll average is 7.4 percentage points worse. This margin is outside the poll's sampling error, which suggests that the poll is an outlier.

The poll compared with PollyVote's prediction

The current PollyVote expects Trump to gain 46.5% of the two-party vote. That is, the PollyVote is 7.9 points below polling numbers. Again, a look at the poll's error margin indicates that this deviation is significant.

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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