New Morning Consult poll: Trump and Clinton virtually tied
By Morning Consult published the results of a new national poll. In this poll, participants were asked for whom they will vote: Republican nominee Donald Trump or Democrat nominee Hillary Clinton.
Morning Consult poll results
Of those who replied, 42.0% said that they would vote for former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, whereas 40.0% declared that they would give their vote to real estate developer Donald Trump.
The poll was conducted via Internet from September 1 to September 2 among 2001 participants. The sampling error is +/-2.2 percentage points, which means that the poll results for both candidates do not differ significantly.
Putting the results in context
As any other method, polls are subject to bias. In general, a good strategy is to not have too much faith in the results of an individual poll. Rather, one should examine how a poll's results compare to benchmark forecasts.
In order to make the results comparable to forecasts from other methods, you can convert them into two-party vote shares. This procedure results in values of 48.8% for Clinton and 51.2% for Trump.
Comparison to other polls
If we look at an average of polls, Trump's two-party vote share is currently at 47.7%. Relative to numbers in the Morning Consult poll Trump's poll average is 3.5 percentage points worse. This margin is outside the poll's margin of error, which means that the poll is an outlier.
Comparison to the combined PollyVote
The latest PollyVote predicts Trump to gain 47.1% of the two-party vote. That is, the combined PollyVote is 4.1 points below polling numbers. The PollyVote forecast is therefore outside the poll's sampling error.
