Trump and Clinton neck-and-neck in new Morning Consult poll

Results of a new national poll administered by Morning Consult were released. The poll asked respondents for whom they will vote: Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump.

According to the results, 43.0% of interviewees are going to vote for former New York Senator Hillary Clinton, while 40.0% plan to vote for businessman Donald Trump.

The Internet poll was conducted from August 24 to August 26 with 2007 respondents. There is a sampling error of +/-2.2 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. Hence, you should not rely too much on the results of an individual poll. At the very least, one should check how a poll's results compare to benchmark forecasts.

In order to make the results comparable to benchmark forecasts, one can translate them into shares of the two-party vote. This procedure results in values of 48.2% for Clinton and 51.8% for Trump.

Comparison to other polls

If we look at an average of polls, Trump's two-party vote share is currently at 46.8%. Compared to numbers in the Morning Consult poll Trump's poll average is 5 percentage points lower. This difference is outside the poll's error margin, which means that the poll is an outlier.

The poll compared with PollyVote's forecast

The current PollyVote forecasts Trump to gain 46.3% of the two-party vote. That is, Polly's combined forecast is 5.5 points below polling numbers. Again, a look at the poll's error margin suggests 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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