Latest NBC News poll: Clinton holds negligible advantage
By Results of a new national poll carried out by NBC News were circulated. The poll asked participants for whom they will vote: Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump.
NBC News poll results
Of those who responded, 48.0% said that they are going to vote for former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, whereas 42.0% revealed that they would give their vote to businessman Donald Trump.
The poll was conducted from August 22 to August 28. A total of 2410 respondents responded. Taking into account the poll's margin of error of +/-1.0 percentage points, the results reflect a statistical tie.
Putting the results in context
Single polls often include large biases, which is why they should be interpreted with caution. Instead of trusting the results from single polls, the evidence-based approach is to rely on combined polls or, even better, the combined PollyVote forecast that incorporates different methods and data.
To make the results comparable to forecasts from benchmark methods, one can translate them into two-party vote shares. This procedure yields figures of 53.3% for Clinton and 46.7% for Trump.
Comparison to other polls
Looking at an average of polls, Clinton's two-party vote share is currently at 53.1%. In comparison to numbers in the NBC News poll Clinton's poll average is 0.2 percentage points worse. This margin is within the poll's sampling error, which suggests that the poll is not an outlier.
Comparison to the combined PollyVote
The current PollyVote expects Clinton to gain 53.6% of the two-party vote. This means that the combined PollyVote is 0.3 points above polling numbers. Again, a look at the poll's sampling error reveals that this deviation is negligible.
