New NBC News poll: Clinton with negligible advantage
By Results of a new national poll carried out by NBC News were circulated. The poll asked respondents for whom they will vote: Donald·Trump or Hillary·Clinton.
NBC News poll results
Of those who answered the question, 48.0% said that they are going to vote for former New York Senator Hillary Clinton, whereas 42.0% indicated that they would give their vote to real estate developer Donald Trump.
This poll was conducted from August 29 to September 4, among a random sample of 3222 participants. Taking into account the poll's sampling error of +/-1.0 percentage points, the difference between both candidates is statistically significant.
Putting the results in context
As any other method, polls are subject to bias. Hence, a good strategy is to not have too much confidence in the results of a single poll. Rather than relying on results from single polls, one should look at combined polls or, even better, a combined forecast that uses forecasts from different methods, each of which uses different data.
In order to make the results comparable to forecasts from benchmark methods, we translate them into shares of the two-party vote. This procedure yields values of 53.3% for Clinton and 46.7% for Trump.
Results vs. other polls
Looking at an average of polls, Clinton's two-party vote share is currently at 52.0%. This value is 1.3 percentage points lower than corresponding numbers in the NBC News poll. This deviation is outside the poll's margin of error, which suggests that the poll is an outlier.
Results compared to the combined PollyVote forecast
The most recent PollyVote forecasts Clinton to gain 52.5% of the two-party vote. This means that Polly's forecast is 0.8 points below polling numbers. Again, a look at the poll's margin of error indicates that this difference is negligible.
