Reuters poll: Clinton with 7 points lead
By Reuters published the results of a new national poll. In this poll, interviewees were asked for whom they will vote: Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump.
Reuters poll results
Of those who responded, 44.0% said that they are going to vote for former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, whereas 37.0% indicated that they would give their vote to businessman Donald Trump.
The poll was conducted from September 29 to October 3 with 1239 participants. Taking into account the poll's sampling error of +/-3.2 percentage points, the gap in voter support is statistically significant.
Putting the results in context
Single polls should be treated with caution, since they may include substantial biases. Rather than trusting the results from single polls, the best practice scientific advice is to consult combined polls or, even better, a combined forecast that draws upon different methods and data.
In order to make the results comparable to forecasts from other methods, we translate them into two-party vote shares. This yields figures of 54.3% for Clinton and 45.7% for Trump. In the most recent Reuters poll on September 26 Clinton obtained only 53.7%, while Trump obtained 46.3%.
Results vs. other polls
An average of recent polls has Clinton at 52.4% of the two-party vote. Relative to numbers in the Reuters poll Clinton's poll average is 1.9 percentage points worse. This difference is within the poll's error margin, which suggests that the poll is not an outlier.
The poll in comparison with PollyVote's forecast
The most recent PollyVote predicts Clinton to gain 52.6% of the two-party vote. This means that the PollyVote forecast is 1.7 points below polling numbers. Again, a look at the poll's margin of error shows that this difference is insignificant.
