Oregon: Tossup between Trump and Clinton in latest Clout Research (R) poll
Results of a new poll conducted by Clout Research (R) were circulated. The poll asked interviewees from Oregon for whom they will vote: Republican Donald Trump or Democrat Hillary Clinton.
Clout Research (R) poll results
The results show that 42.0% of interviewees are going to give their vote to former First Lady Hillary Clinton, whereas 44.0% plan to vote for real estate developer Donald Trump.
The poll was carried out from May 10 to May 13 with 657 likely voters. There is a sampling error of +/-3.8 percentage points. Considering this error margin, the race is currently a statistical tie.
Putting the results in context
As any other method, polls are subject to bias. Hence, one should not be too confident the results of an individual poll. Instead of trusting the results from single polls, research in forecasting recommends to rely on combined polls or, even better, the combined PollyVote forecast that uses forecasts from different methods, each of which draws upon different data.
For the following analysis, we convert Clinton's and Trump's raw poll numbers into shares of the two-party vote. This yields figures of 48.8% for Clinton and 51.2% for Trump. On July 13 Clinton obtained 51.8% in the Clout Research (R) poll and Trump obtained only 48.2%.
Results compared to the combined PollyVote prediction
The most recent PollyVote forecasts Trump to gain 43.2% of the two-party vote in Oregon. That is, the combined PollyVote is 8.0 points below her polling numbers. Again, a look at the poll's sampling error indicates that this deviation is significant.