FOX poll: Trump behind by 6 points
By Results of a new national poll conducted by FOX were announced. The poll asked respondents for whom they will vote: Democrat Hillary Clinton or Republican Donald Trump.
FOX poll results
The results show that 48.0% of participants are going to cast a ballot for former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, whereas 42.0% plan to vote for billionaire Donald Trump.
This poll was conducted via phone from August 28 to August 30, among a random sample of 1011 participants. Considering the poll's margin of error of +/-3.0 percentage points, the difference between both candidates is statistically significant.
Putting the results in context
As any other method, polls are subject to bias. As a result, don't have too much faith in the results of a single poll. Rather than trusting the results from single polls, the best practice is to rely on combined polls or, even better, a combined forecast that incorporates forecasts from different methods, each of which incorporates different data.
For the following comparison, we convert Clinton's and Trump's raw poll numbers into shares of the two-party vote. This procedure yields values of 53.3% for Clinton and 46.7% for Trump.
Results compared to other polls
Clinton is currently at 52.3% of the major two-party vote in an average of recent polls. This value is 1 percentage point lower than corresponding numbers in the FOX poll. This margin is within the poll's margin of error, which means that the poll is not an outlier.
Comparison to the combined PollyVote
The most recent PollyVote anticipates Clinton to gain 53.2% of the two-party vote. Hence, the PollyVote forecast is 0.1 points below polling numbers. The PollyVote forecast is thus within the poll's margin of error.
