Trump and Clinton virtually tied in latest FOX poll
Results of a new national poll carried out by FOX were distributed. The poll asked interviewees for whom they will vote: Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump.
FOX poll results
Of those who answered the question, 45.0% said that they would vote for former New York Senator Hillary Clinton, while 46.0% revealed that they would give their vote to real estate developer Donald Trump.
The phone poll was carried out from September 11 to September 14 with 867 likely voters. Taking into account the poll's sampling error of +/-3.4 percentage points, the results reflect a statistical tie.
Putting the results in context
As any other method, polls are subject to bias. Hence, you should not rely too much on the results of an individual poll. Rather than relying on results from single polls, forecasting research recommends to look at combined polls or, even better, the combined PollyVote forecast that incorporates different methods and data.
To make the results comparable to forecasts from benchmark methods, one can convert them into shares of the two-party vote. The resulting figures are 49.5% for Clinton and 50.6% for Trump. To compare: Only 46.7% was obtained by Clinton in the FOX poll on August 30, for Trump this result was only 0.0%.
Results in comparison to other polls
Looking at an average of polls, Trump's two-party vote share is currently at 49.0%. Relative to numbers in the FOX poll Trump's poll average is 1.6 percentage points lower. This difference is within the poll's margin of error, which means that the poll is not an outlier.
The poll in comparison with PollyVote's forecast
The current PollyVote forecasts Trump to gain 47.1% of the two-party vote. This means that the combined PollyVote is 3.5 points below polling numbers. Again, a look at the poll's margin of error reveals that this difference is significant.