Virtual tie between Trump and Clinton in new UPI/CVOTER poll
By Results of a new national poll conducted by UPI/CVOTER were distributed. The poll asked respondents for whom they will vote: Democrat Hillary Clinton or Republican Donald Trump.
UPI/CVOTER poll results
Of those who replied, 49.0% said that they intend to vote for former New York Senator Hillary Clinton, while 47.0% revealed that they would give their vote to billionaire Donald Trump.
The poll was conducted via Internet from August 28 to September 4 among 1237 likely voters. There is a sampling error of +/-2.8 percentage points. Considering this error margin, the race is currently a statistical tie.
Putting the results in context
As any other method, polls are subject to bias. Thus, as a general rule, a good strategy is to not put too much trust in the results of a single poll. Instead of trusting the results from single polls, the best practice is to rely on combined polls or, even better, a combined forecast that relies on forecasts from different methods, each of which relies on different data.
In order to make the results comparable to forecasts from other methods, one can translate them into two-party vote shares. This yields figures of 51.0% for Clinton and 49.0% for Trump. To compare: Only 49.0% was obtained by Clinton in the UPI/CVOTER poll on September 6, for Trump this number was 51.0%.
Comparison to other polls
Clinton currently achieves 52.1% of the major two-party vote according to an average of recent polls. This value is 1.1 percentage points higher than corresponding numbers in the UPI/CVOTER poll. This difference is within the poll's margin of error, which suggests that the poll is not an outlier.
Comparison to the combined PollyVote
The latest PollyVote anticipates Clinton to gain 52.4% of the two-party vote. That is, Polly's forecast is 1.4 points above polling numbers. The PollyVote forecast is thus in line with the poll's margin of error.
