Monmouth poll: Clinton with steady advantage
By Monmouth published the results of a new national poll. In this poll, interviewees were asked for whom they will vote: Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton.
Monmouth poll results
Of those who replied, 49.0% said that they intend to vote for former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, while 42.0% declared that they would give their vote to businessman Donald Trump.
This poll was conducted from August 25 to August 28, among a random sample of 689 participants. There is a sampling error of +/-3.7 percentage points. Considering this error margin, the race is currently a statistical tie.
Putting the results in context
Single polls should be regarded with caution, because they often contain substantial errors. Instead of trusting the results from single polls, research in forecasting recommends to rely on combined polls or, even better, the combined PollyVote forecast that includes forecasts from different methods, each of which includes different data.
For the following comparison, we convert Trump's and Clinton's raw poll numbers into two-party vote shares. The corresponding figures are 53.9% for Clinton and 46.2% for Trump.
Results in comparison to other polls
Looking at an average of polls, Clinton's two-party vote share is currently at 52.9%. Compared to numbers in the Monmouth poll Clinton's poll average is 1 percentage point worse. This margin is within the poll's margin of error, which means that the poll is not an outlier.
The poll compared with PollyVote's forecast
The latest PollyVote expects Clinton to gain 53.6% of the two-party vote. That is, the combined PollyVote is 0.3 points below polling numbers. Again, a look at the poll's sampling error shows that this deviation is insignificant.
