Clinton and Trump neck-and-neck in latest IBD/TIPP poll
By IBD/TIPP 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.
IBD/TIPP poll results
Of those who replied, 44.0% said that they intend to vote for former New York Senator Hillary Clinton, whereas 43.0% revealed that they would give their vote to real estate developer Donald Trump.
The phone poll was carried out between August 26 and September 1. The sample size was 887 participants. If one takes into account the poll's sampling error of +/-3.4 percentage points, the results reflect a statistical tie.
Putting the results in context
As a general rule, however, one should not have too much faith in the results of single polls, as they often incorporate large errors. Rather than relying on results from single polls, the evidence-based approach is to use combined polls or, even better, a combined forecast that includes different methods and data.
For the following analysis, we convert Trump's and Clinton's raw poll numbers into shares of the two-party vote. This procedure results in values of 49.4% for Clinton and 50.6% for Trump. In the latest IBD/TIPP poll on August 7 Clinton obtained only 45.9%, while Trump obtained only 0.0%.
Comparison to other polls
An average of recent polls sees Trump at 47.5% of the two-party vote. This value is 3.1 percentage points lower than corresponding numbers in the IBD/TIPP poll. This difference is within the poll's margin of error, which suggests that the poll is not an outlier.
The poll compared with PollyVote's prediction
The latest PollyVote predicts Trump to gain 46.6% of the two-party vote. That is, the PollyVote is 4.0 points below polling numbers. Again, a look at the poll's error margin indicates that this difference is significant.
