4 points lead for Clinton in new NBC News poll
By NBC News released the results of a new national poll, in which respondents were asked for whom they will vote: Democrat candidate Hillary Clinton or Republican candidate Donald Trump.
NBC News poll results
According to the results, 48.0% of respondents are going to give their vote to former New York Senator Hillary Clinton, whereas 44.0% are going to vote for businessman Donald Trump.
The poll was conducted from September 5 to September 11. A total of 1622 respondents responded. The error margin is +/-1.1 percentage points, which means that the poll results for the two candidates differ significantly.
Putting the results in context
As any other method, polls are subject to bias. Thus, as a general rule, one should not focus too much on the results of a single poll. At the very least, one should examine how a poll's results compare to benchmark forecasts.
In order to make the results comparable to benchmark forecasts, you can convert them into shares of the two-party vote. This yields figures of 52.2% for Clinton and 47.8% for Trump. For comparison: 53.3% was obtained by Clinton in the NBC News poll on September 12, for Trump this number was only 46.7%.
Comparison to other polls
An average of recent polls sees Clinton at 51.9% of the two-party vote. This value is 0.3 percentage points lower than respective numbers in the NBC News poll. This deviation is within the poll's sampling error, which suggests that the poll is not an outlier.
Results compared to the combined PollyVote forecast
The most recent PollyVote foresees Clinton to gain 53.1% of the two-party vote. That is, Polly's forecast is 0.9 points above polling numbers. The PollyVote forecast is thus in line with the poll's error margin.
