Clinton and Trump virtually tied in new ARG poll
By ARG released the results of a new national poll, in which respondents were asked for whom they will vote: Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump.
ARG poll results
Of those who responded, 47.0% said that they intend to vote for former New York Senator Hillary Clinton, while 44.0% indicated that they would give their vote to businessman Donald Trump.
The phone poll was carried out between September 17 and September 20. The sample size was 990 participants. Given the poll's sampling error of +/-3.2 percentage points, the results reflect a statistical tie.
Putting the results in context
In general, however, don't have too much faith in the results of single polls, as they sometimes contain large errors. At least, one should check how a poll's results compare to benchmark forecasts.
In order to make the results comparable to benchmark forecasts, we translate them into two-party vote shares. The resulting figures are 51.7% for Clinton and 48.4% for Trump. In the most recent ARG poll on August 20 Clinton obtained 52.8%, while Trump obtained only 0.0%.
Results in comparison to other polls
Clinton currently achieves 51.4% of the major two-party vote according to an average of recent polls. This value is 0.3 percentage points lower than corresponding numbers in the ARG poll. This margin is within the poll's sampling error, which suggests that the poll is not an outlier.
Results compared to the combined PollyVote forecast
The current PollyVote forecasts Clinton to gain 52.7% of the two-party vote. Hence, the PollyVote forecast is 1.0 point above polling numbers. Again, a look at the poll's margin of error indicates that this deviation is negligible.
