New Reuters poll: Trump trails by a sustained margin
By Reuters released the results of a new national poll, in which respondents were asked for whom they will vote: Democrat candidate Hillary Clinton or Republican candidate Donald Trump.
Reuters poll results
According to the results, 42.0% of respondents are going to vote for former First Lady Hillary Clinton, while 35.0% would vote for real estate developer Donald Trump.
This poll was conducted from August 20 to August 24, among a random sample of 1049 participants. Given the poll's margin of error of +/-3.5 percentage points, the results reflect a statistical tie.
Putting the results in context
As a general rule, however, you should not have too much faith in the results of single polls, because they sometimes contain large errors. Rather than trusting the results from single polls, you should use combined polls or, even better, a combined forecast that relies on different methods and data.
For the following analysis, we convert Trump's and Clinton's raw poll numbers into two-party vote shares. This procedure results in figures of 54.6% for Clinton and 45.5% for Trump.
Results in comparison to other polls
Looking at an average of polls, Clinton's current two-party vote share is at 53.2%. Relative to numbers in the Reuters poll Clinton's poll average is 1.4 percentage points lower. This deviation is within the poll's sampling error, which means that the poll is not an outlier.
Comparison to the combined PollyVote
The current PollyVote forecasts Clinton to gain 53.7% of the two-party vote. This means that Polly's combined forecast is 0.9 points below polling numbers. Again, a look at the poll's sampling error shows that this deviation is negligible.
