New Quinnipiac poll shows Trump with 10 points lead
By Results of a new national poll carried out by Quinnipiac were circulated. The poll asked respondents for whom they will vote: Donald·Trump or Hillary·Clinton.
Quinnipiac poll results
The phone poll was conducted from August 18 to August 24 with 1498 likely voters. There is a sampling error of +/-2.6 percentage points. Considering this error margin, the gap between both candidates is statistically significant.
Putting the results in context
As any other method, polls are subject to bias. Hence, you should not be overly confident the results of a single poll. Instead of relying on results from single polls, forecasting research recommends to rely on combined polls or, even better, the combined PollyVote forecast that relies on forecasts from different methods, each of which draws upon different data.
For the following analysis, we translate Trump's and Clinton's raw poll numbers into two-party vote shares. This yields figures of 44.6% for Clinton and 55.4% for Trump. On August 3 Clinton received 51.2% in the Quinnipiac poll and Trump received only 48.8%.
Results vs. other polls
Trump currently runs at 46.8% of the major two-party vote in an average of recent polls. In comparison to numbers in the Quinnipiac poll Trump's poll average is 8.6 percentage points worse. This margin is outside the poll's margin of error, which suggests that the poll is an outlier.
The poll in comparison with PollyVote's forecast
The latest PollyVote anticipates Trump to gain 46.6% of the two-party vote. Hence, the PollyVote forecast is 8.8 points below polling numbers. The PollyVote forecast is therefore outside the poll's sampling error.
