New UPI/CVOTER poll: Clinton and Trump in a virtual tie
By UPI/CVOTER released the results of a new national poll, in which respondents were asked for whom they will vote: Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton.
UPI/CVOTER poll results
Of those who responded, 49.0% said that they would vote for former First Lady Hillary Clinton, whereas 46.0% said that they would give their vote to businessman Donald Trump.
The poll was conducted via Internet from August 24 to August 30 among 1162 likely voters. The margin of error is +/-2.9 percentage points, which means that the levels of voter support for both candidates do not differ significantly.
Putting the results in context
In general, however, don't have too much faith in the results of single polls, as they sometimes incorporate large errors. Instead of relying on results from single polls, the best practice is to look at combined polls or, even better, a combined forecast that relies on forecasts from different methods, each of which relies on different data.
For the following comparison, we translate Trump's and Clinton's raw poll numbers into two-party vote shares. This procedure yields figures of 48.4% for Clinton and 51.6% for Trump.
Comparison to other polls
Looking at an average of polls, Trump's two-party vote share is currently at 46.7%. Relative to numbers in the UPI/CVOTER poll Trump's poll average is 5 percentage points lower. This deviation is outside the poll's error margin, which suggests that the poll is an outlier.
Comparison to the combined PollyVote
The current PollyVote predicts Trump to gain 46.6% of the two-party vote. This means that the combined PollyVote is 5.0 points below polling numbers. Again, a look at the poll's sampling error reveals that this difference is significant.
