Virtual tie between Clinton and Trump in latest Reuters poll
By Results of a new national poll conducted by Reuters were distributed. The poll asked interviewees for whom they will vote: Republican Donald Trump or Democrat Hillary Clinton.
Reuters poll results
Of those who responded, 40.0% said that they would vote for former New York Senator Hillary Clinton, whereas 39.0% said that they would give their vote to businessman Donald Trump.
The poll was in the field between August 25 and August 29. The sample size was 1404 participants. The margin of error is +/-3.0 percentage points. This means that the levels of voter support for the two candidates do not differ significantly.
Putting the results in context
As any other method, polls are subject to bias. Thus, as a general rule, one should not focus too much on the results of a single poll. Rather than relying on results from single polls, the evidence-based approach is to look at combined polls or, even better, a combined forecast that draws upon forecasts from different methods, each of which draws upon different data.
To make the results comparable to forecasts from benchmark methods, we convert them into two-party vote shares. This procedure results in values of 50.6% for Clinton and 49.4% for Trump.
Results in comparison to other polls
Clinton is currently at 53.3% of the two-party vote according to an average of recent polls. This value is 2.7 percentage points higher than respective numbers in the Reuters poll. This difference is within the poll's error margin, which means that the poll is not an outlier.
Comparison to the combined PollyVote
The most recent PollyVote forecasts Clinton to gain 53.4% of the two-party vote. That is, Polly's prediction is 2.8 points above polling numbers. Again, a look at the poll's margin of error reveals that this difference is insignificant.
