Dead heat between Trump and Clinton in latest UPI/CVOTER poll
Results of a new national poll administered by UPI/CVOTER were distributed. The poll asked respondents for whom they will vote: Democrat candidate Hillary Clinton or Republican candidate Donald Trump.
UPI/CVOTER poll results
Of those who replied, 47.0% said that they would vote for former New York Senator Hillary Clinton, whereas 49.0% said that they would give their vote to billionaire Donald Trump.
This poll was conducted via Internet from September 23 to September 29, among a random sample of 1236 likely voters. The margin of error is +/-2.8 points. This means that the levels of voter support for the Democratic and the Republican candidate do not differ significantly.
Putting the results in context
As a general rule, however, don't have too much faith in the results of single polls, because they may incorporate large errors. Instead of relying on results from single polls, we recommend to use combined polls or, even better, the combined PollyVote forecast that includes different methods and data.
In order to make the results comparable to benchmark forecasts, we translate them into two-party vote shares. This procedure results in values of 49.0% for Clinton and 51.0% for Trump. To compare: 50.0% was gained by Clinton in the UPI/CVOTER poll on September 27, for Trump this number was only 50.0%.
Comparison to other polls
Trump currently runs at 48.1% of the major two-party vote according to an average of recent polls. This value is 2.9 percentage points lower than corresponding numbers in the UPI/CVOTER poll. This deviation is outside the poll's error margin, which suggests that the poll is an outlier.
Results compared to the combined PollyVote prediction
The most recent PollyVote forecasts Trump to gain 47.7% of the two-party vote. That is, the PollyVote is 3.3 points below polling numbers. Again, a look at the poll's error margin indicates that this difference is significant.