Clinton and Trump neck-and-neck in new Reuters poll
By Reuters released the results of a new national poll, in which respondents were asked for whom they will vote: Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump.
Reuters poll results
The results show that 40.0% of respondents are going to cast a ballot for former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, whereas 39.0% are going to vote for businessman Donald Trump.
The poll was conducted from September 8 to September 12. A total of 1127 participants responded. Taking into account the poll's error margin of +/-3.3 percentage points, the results reflect a statistical tie.
Putting the results in context
Single polls should be regarded with caution, since they can include substantial biases. Instead of relying on results from single polls, the recommended strategy rely on combined polls or, even better, the combined PollyVote forecast that incorporates different methods and data.
For the following analysis, we convert the candidates' raw poll numbers into two-party vote shares. The respective figures are 50.6% for Clinton and 49.4% for Trump. On September 4 Clinton received only 49.4% in the Reuters poll and Trump received only 0.0%.
Comparison to other polls
Clinton is currently at 51.8% of the major two-party vote according to an average of recent polls. This value is 1.2 percentage points higher than respective numbers in the Reuters poll. This difference is within the poll's error margin, which means that the poll is not an outlier.
Comparison to the combined PollyVote
The current PollyVote predicts Clinton to gain 53.1% of the two-party vote. Hence, Polly's combined forecast is 2.5 points above polling numbers. Again, a look at the poll's sampling error suggests that this deviation is negligible.
