Dead heat between Trump and Clinton in new Ipsos/Reuters poll
By Ipsos/Reuters released the results of a new national poll, in which respondents were asked for whom they will vote: Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump.
Ipsos/Reuters poll results
According to the results, 40.0% of respondents will vote for former New York Senator Hillary Clinton, whereas 39.0% are going to vote for real estate developer Donald Trump.
The Internet poll was in the field between August 25 and August 30. The sample size was 1404 likely voters. The margin of error is +/-2.7 percentage points, which means that the poll results for Clinton and Trump do not differ significantly.
Putting the results in context
Individual polls can contain substantial biases, which is why they should be interpreted with caution. Instead of relying on results from single polls, the recommended strategy rely on combined polls or, even better, a combined forecast that includes forecasts from different methods, each of which includes different data.
For the following analysis, we convert the candidates' raw poll numbers into two-party vote shares. The resulting figures are 49.4% for Clinton and 50.6% for Trump.
Comparison to other polls
Trump currently achieves 47.2% of the two-party vote according to an average of recent polls. In comparison to numbers in the Ipsos/Reuters poll Trump's poll average is 3.5 percentage points lower. This deviation is outside the poll's error margin, which means that the poll is an outlier.
Comparison to the combined PollyVote
The most recent PollyVote forecasts Trump to gain 46.5% of the two-party vote. This means that the PollyVote is 4.1 points below polling numbers. Again, a look at the poll's error margin indicates that this difference is significant.
