NBC/SurveyMonkey poll: Clinton with narrow lead
By NBC/SurveyMonkey 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.
NBC/SurveyMonkey poll results
The results show that 48.0% of participants indicated to vote for former New York Senator Hillary Clinton, whereas 42.0% plan to vote for billionaire Donald Trump.
The Internet poll was carried out from August 29 to September 4 with 32226 participants. If one takes into account the poll's sampling error of +/-0.6 percentage points, the difference in voter support is statistically significant.
Putting the results in context
As any other method, polls are subject to bias. In general, a good strategy is to not focus too much on the results of a single poll. Instead of trusting the results from single polls, we recommend to rely on combined polls or, even better, a combined forecast that draws upon forecasts from different methods, each of which draws upon different data.
To make the results comparable to forecasts from other methods, one can convert them into two-party vote shares. This procedure yields figures of 53.3% for Clinton and 46.7% for Trump. On September 6 Clinton received only 46.7% in the NBC/SurveyMonkey poll and Trump received 53.3%.
Results vs. other polls
An average of recent polls has Clinton at 52.1% of the two-party vote. This value is 1.2 percentage points lower than respective numbers in the NBC/SurveyMonkey poll. This deviation is outside the poll's error margin, which suggests that the poll is an outlier.
Comparison to the combined PollyVote
The most recent PollyVote foresees Clinton to gain 52.4% of the two-party vote. This means that the combined PollyVote is 0.9 points below polling numbers. The PollyVote forecast is therefore outside the poll's margin of error.
