Virtual tie between Trump and Clinton in new CNN poll
By CNN published the results of a new national poll. In this poll, respondents were asked for whom they will vote: Republican Donald Trump or Democrat Hillary Clinton.
CNN poll results
Of those who responded, 48.0% said that they will vote for former First Lady Hillary Clinton, while 49.0% revealed that they would give their vote to real estate developer Donald Trump.
The phone poll was conducted between September 1 and September 4. The sample size was 786 likely voters. Taking into account the poll's margin of error of +/-3.5 percentage points, the results reflect a statistical tie.
Putting the results in context
As any other method, polls are subject to bias. In general, a good strategy is to not have too much faith in the results of an individual poll. Instead of relying on results from single polls, you should rely on combined polls or, even better, the combined PollyVote forecast that draws upon forecasts from different methods, each of which draws upon different data.
In order to make the results comparable to forecasts from benchmark methods, you can translate them into two-party vote shares. This yields figures of 49.5% for Clinton and 50.5% for Trump.
Results in comparison to other polls
Looking at an average of polls, Trump's current two-party vote share is at 47.9%. In comparison to numbers in the CNN poll Trump's poll average is 2.6 percentage points worse. This deviation is within the poll's error margin, which suggests that the poll is not an outlier.
Results compared to the combined PollyVote forecast
The latest PollyVote predicts Trump to gain 47.5% of the two-party vote. This means that Polly's prediction is 3.0 points below polling numbers. The PollyVote forecast is therefore in line with the poll's sampling error.
