Trump and Clinton neck-and-neck in new IBD poll
By IBD published the results of a new national poll. In this poll, participants were asked for whom they will vote: Republican Donald Trump or Democrat Hillary Clinton.
IBD poll results
Of those who replied, 44.0% said that they intend to vote for former New York Senator Hillary Clinton, whereas 43.0% indicated that they would give their vote to businessman Donald Trump.
The poll was conducted from August 26 to September 1 among 861 participants. There is a sampling error of +/-3.4 percentage points. Considering this error margin, the race is currently a statistical tie.
Putting the results in context
As a general rule, however, don't have too much faith in the results of single polls, since they often incorporate large errors. At the very least, one should examine how a poll's results compare to benchmark forecasts.
For the following comparison, we convert Trump's and Clinton's raw poll numbers into shares of the two-party vote. This yields figures of 50.6% for Clinton and 49.4% for Trump.
Comparison to other polls
Clinton can currently count on 52.3% of the major two-party vote according to an average of recent polls. This value is 1.7 percentage points higher than respective numbers in the IBD poll. This margin is within the poll's error margin, which suggests that the poll is not an outlier.
Results compared to the combined PollyVote prediction
The latest PollyVote expects Clinton to gain 53.2% of the two-party vote. This means that the PollyVote forecast is 2.6 points above polling numbers. Again, a look at the poll's sampling error shows that this deviation is insignificant.
