New NBC News poll shows Clinton with 7 points lead
By NBC News released the results of a new national poll, in which respondents were asked for whom they will vote: Democrat Hillary Clinton or Republican Donald Trump.
NBC News poll results
Of those who answered the question, 48.0% said that they intend to vote for former New York Senator Hillary Clinton, whereas 41.0% indicated that they would give their vote to billionaire Donald Trump.
The poll was conducted from September 16 to September 19 with 922 participants. There is a sampling error of +/-3.2 percentage points. Considering this error margin, the gap between both candidates is statistically significant.
Putting the results in context
In general, however, you should not have too much faith in the results of single polls, because they often incorporate large errors. Rather than trusting the results from single polls, forecasting research recommends to consult combined polls or, even better, the combined PollyVote forecast that incorporates forecasts from different methods, each of which draws upon different data.
To make the results comparable to forecasts from other methods, one can translate them into shares of the two-party vote. The resulting figures are 53.9% for Clinton and 46.1% for Trump. In the most recent NBC News poll on August 28 Clinton received only 46.7%, while Trump received only 0.0%.
Results in comparison to other polls
Clinton currently runs at 51.4% of the major two-party vote according to an average of recent polls. This value is 2.5 percentage points lower than respective numbers in the NBC News poll. This margin is within the poll's error margin, which means that the poll is not an outlier.
Comparison to the combined PollyVote
The most recent PollyVote expects Clinton to gain 52.3% of the two-party vote. That is, Polly's prediction is 1.6 points below polling numbers. Again, a look at the poll's margin of error suggests that this deviation is insignificant.
