New UPI/CVOTER poll: Trump and Clinton neck-and-neck
By UPI/CVOTER published the results of a new national poll. In this poll, interviewees were asked for whom they will vote: Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump.
UPI/CVOTER poll results
Of those who answered the question, 48.0% said that they would vote for former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, while 49.0% said that they would give their vote to real estate developer Donald Trump.
The Internet poll was carried out between August 18 and August 24. The sample size was 1187 likely voters. If one accounts for the poll's sampling error of +/-2.9 percentage points, the results reflect a statistical tie.
Putting the results in context
As any other method, polls are subject to bias. In general, you should not have too much faith in the results of a single poll. Instead of relying on results from single polls, we recommend to use combined polls or, even better, the combined PollyVote forecast that incorporates forecasts from different methods, each of which draws upon different data.
For the following analysis, we translate Clinton's and Trump's raw poll numbers into shares of the two-party vote. This yields figures of 50.5% for Clinton and 49.5% for Trump. In the most recent UPI/CVOTER poll on August 26 Clinton received only 49.5%, while Trump received only 0.0%.
Comparison to other polls
Looking at an average of polls, Clinton's two-party vote share is currently at 53.1%. This value is 2.6 percentage points higher than respective numbers in the UPI/CVOTER poll. This difference is within the poll's sampling error, which suggests that the poll is not an outlier.
Results compared to the combined PollyVote forecast
The current PollyVote anticipates Clinton to gain 53.7% of the two-party vote. That is, Polly's forecast is 3.2 points above polling numbers. Again, a look at the poll's error margin suggests that this deviation is significant.
