6 points lead for Clinton in new NBC News poll
NBC News released the results of a new national poll, in which respondents were asked for whom they will vote: Republican nominee Donald Trump or Democrat nominee Hillary Clinton.
NBC News poll results
According to the results, 50.0% of participants would vote for former First Lady Hillary Clinton, while 44.0% would vote for real estate developer Donald Trump.
The poll was conducted from September 26 to October 2. A total of 2692 respondents responded. If one accounts for the poll's sampling error of +/-1.0 percentage points, the gap in voter support is statistically significant.
Putting the results in context
Single polls should be regarded with caution, as they may incorporate large biases. Rather than trusting the results from single polls, research in forecasting recommends to consult combined polls or, even better, the combined PollyVote forecast that relies on different methods and data.
To make the results comparable to forecasts from benchmark methods, we convert them into two-party vote shares. This yields figures of 53.2% for Clinton and 46.8% for Trump. To compare: 53.7% was gained by Clinton in the NBC News poll on September 25, for Trump this result was only 46.3%.
Comparison to other polls
Clinton can currently count on 52.3% of the major two-party vote in an average of recent polls. In comparison to numbers in the NBC News poll Clinton's poll average is 1 percentage point lower. This margin is within the poll's error margin, which means that the poll is not an outlier.
The poll in comparison with PollyVote's prediction
The most recent PollyVote anticipates Clinton to gain 52.5% of the two-party vote. This means that Polly's combined forecast is 0.7 points below polling numbers. Again, a look at the poll's error margin indicates that this difference is insignificant.