7 points lead for Clinton in new Monmouth poll
By Monmouth published the results of a new national poll. In this poll, respondents were asked for whom they will vote: Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump.
Monmouth poll results
The results show that 49.0% of participants would vote for former New York Senator Hillary Clinton, whereas 42.0% would vote for real estate developer Donald Trump.
The poll was conducted from August 25 to August 28. A total of 689 respondents responded. The error margin is +/-3.7 points, which means that the poll results for Clinton and Trump differ significantly.
Putting the results in context
As any other method, polls are subject to bias. Thus, as a general rule, don't have too much faith in the results of an individual poll. At least, one should check how a poll's results compare to benchmark forecasts.
For the following analysis, we translate Clinton's and Trump's raw poll numbers into shares of the two-party vote. The resulting figures are 53.9% for Clinton and 46.2% for Trump.
Comparison to other polls
Clinton currently achieves 52.7% of the major two-party vote in an average of recent polls. Relative to numbers in the Monmouth poll Clinton's poll average is 1.2 percentage points lower. This deviation is within the poll's error margin, which means that the poll is not an outlier.
Comparison to the combined PollyVote
The latest PollyVote predicts Clinton to gain 53.4% of the two-party vote. Hence, Polly's combined forecast is 0.5 points below polling numbers. Again, a look at the poll's error margin shows that this difference is insignificant.
