USA Today poll: Trump trails by 7 points
By Results of a new national poll conducted by USA Today were announced. The poll asked respondents for whom they will vote: Democrat candidate Hillary Clinton or Republican candidate Donald Trump.
USA Today poll results
Of those who responded, 48.0% said that they are going to vote for former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, whereas 41.0% said that they would give their vote to billionaire Donald Trump.
The poll was carried out between August 24 and August 29. The sample size was 1000 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
Individual polls often contain large errors, and should be treated with caution. Rather than trusting the results from single polls, you should rely on combined polls or, even better, the combined PollyVote forecast that incorporates 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 53.9% for Clinton and 46.1% for Trump.
Comparison to other polls
Clinton currently achieves 52.3% of the two-party vote in an average of recent polls. This value is 1.7 percentage points lower than respective numbers in the USA Today poll. This deviation is within the poll's sampling error, which suggests that the poll is not an outlier.
The poll compared with PollyVote's prediction
The most recent PollyVote forecasts Clinton to gain 52.9% of the two-party vote. This means that Polly's forecast is 1.0 point below polling numbers. Again, a look at the poll's sampling error suggests that this difference is negligible.
