Latest UPI/CVOTER poll: Trump and Clinton in a tossup
By UPI/CVOTER published the results of a new national poll. In this poll, interviewees were asked for whom they will vote: Democrat Hillary Clinton or Republican Donald Trump.
UPI/CVOTER poll results
The results show that 49.0% of interviewees said that they would cast a ballot for former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, while 47.0% said that they would cast a ballot for real estate developer Donald Trump.
The poll was conducted from August 28 to September 4 via Internet. A total of 1237 likely voters responded. The error margin is +/-2.8 percentage points. This means that the levels of voter support for both candidates do not differ significantly.
Putting the results in context
In general, however, you should not have too much faith in the results of single polls, because they may incorporate large errors. Instead of trusting the results from single polls, one should look at combined polls or, even better, a combined forecast that relies on forecasts from different methods, each of which draws upon different data.
To make the results comparable to forecasts from other methods, we convert them into shares of the two-party vote. This yields figures of 49.0% for Clinton and 51.0% for Trump. In the most recent UPI/CVOTER poll on September 2 Clinton obtained 51.6%, while Trump obtained only 0.0%.
Results vs. other polls
Trump currently achieves 47.8% of the two-party vote according to an average of recent polls. Relative to numbers in the UPI/CVOTER poll Trump's poll average is 3.2 percentage points lower. This deviation is outside the poll's sampling error, which suggests that the poll is an outlier.
The poll in comparison with PollyVote's forecast
The latest PollyVote foresees Trump to gain 47.4% of the two-party vote. That is, the combined PollyVote is 3.6 points below polling numbers. Again, a look at the poll's sampling error reveals that this difference is significant.
