New Reuters poll: Trump and Clinton neck-and-neck
By Results of a new national poll carried out by Reuters were announced. The poll asked participants for whom they will vote: Donald·Trump or Hillary·Clinton.
Reuters poll results
Of those who responded, 40.0% said that they are going to vote for former New York Senator Hillary Clinton, whereas 39.0% revealed that they would give their vote to real estate developer Donald Trump.
The poll was conducted from August 25 to August 29 with 1404 participants. There is a sampling error of +/-3.0 percentage points. Considering this error margin, the race is currently a statistical tie.
Putting the results in context
In general, however, a good strategy is to not have too much faith in the results of single polls, as they can incorporate large errors. Instead of trusting the results from single polls, the evidence-based approach is to look at combined polls or, even better, the combined PollyVote forecast that includes different methods and data.
To make the results comparable to forecasts from benchmark methods, one can translate them into shares of the two-party vote. The corresponding figures are 50.6% for Clinton and 49.4% for Trump.
Results compared to other polls
An average of recent polls sees Clinton at 52.2% of the two-party vote. This value is 1.6 percentage points higher than respective numbers in the Reuters poll. This margin is within the poll's sampling error, which suggests that the poll is not an outlier.
Results compared to the combined PollyVote forecast
The most recent PollyVote predicts Clinton to gain 53.1% of the two-party vote. This means that the PollyVote is 2.5 points above polling numbers. Again, a look at the poll's error margin reveals that this deviation is negligible.
