Negligible advantage for Clinton in FOX poll
By FOX published the results of a new national poll. In this poll, participants were asked for whom they will vote: Democrat candidate Hillary Clinton or Republican candidate Donald Trump.
FOX poll results
Of those who responded, 48.0% said that they intend to vote for former First Lady Hillary Clinton, while 42.0% revealed that they would give their vote to businessman Donald Trump.
The phone poll was conducted between August 28 and August 30. The sample size was 1011 participants. There is a sampling error of +/-3.0 percentage points. Considering this error margin, the gap between both candidates is statistically significant.
Putting the results in context
As a general rule, however, don't have too much faith in the results of single polls, as they can contain large errors. Instead of trusting the results from single polls, the best practice scientific advice is to look at combined polls or, even better, a combined forecast that relies on forecasts from different methods, each of which draws upon different data.
In order to make the results comparable to benchmark forecasts, we convert them into two-party vote shares. This procedure yields values of 53.3% for Clinton and 46.7% for Trump.
Results in comparison to other polls
An average of recent polls has Clinton at 52.3% of the two-party vote. This value is 1.1 percentage points lower than corresponding numbers in the FOX poll. This deviation is within the poll's margin of error, which means that the poll is not an outlier.
The poll in comparison with PollyVote's prediction
The latest PollyVote predicts Clinton to gain 52.9% of the two-party vote. This means that the PollyVote is 0.4 points below polling numbers. The PollyVote forecast is therefore within the poll's margin of error.
