Latest Reuters poll: Clinton and Trump neck-and-neck
By Reuters released the results of a new national poll, in which respondents were asked for whom they will vote: Democrat Hillary Clinton or Republican Donald Trump.
Reuters poll results
The results show that 40.0% of participants will give their vote to former First Lady Hillary Clinton, while 39.0% are going to vote for billionaire Donald Trump.
The poll was conducted from August 25 to August 29. A total of 1404 respondents responded. The margin of error is +/-3.0 percentage points, which means that the levels of voter support for the Democratic and the Republican candidate do not differ significantly.
Putting the results in context
As any other method, polls are subject to bias. As a result, one should not be too confident the results of a single poll. At least, one should examine how a poll's results compare to benchmark forecasts.
In order to make the results comparable to forecasts from benchmark methods, you can convert them into shares of the two-party vote. This procedure results in values of 50.6% for Clinton and 49.4% for Trump.
Results compared to other polls
An average of recent polls sees Clinton at 52.3% of the two-party vote. This value is 1.7 percentage points higher than corresponding numbers in the Reuters poll. This margin is within the poll's sampling error, which means that the poll is not an outlier.
Comparison to the combined PollyVote
The most recent PollyVote foresees Clinton to gain 53.2% of the two-party vote. Hence, the combined PollyVote is 2.6 points above polling numbers. The PollyVote forecast is thus in line with the poll's error margin.
