Clinton with marginal lead in new Quinnipiac poll
By Results of a new national poll administered by Quinnipiac were released. The poll asked respondents for whom they will vote: Democrat Hillary Clinton or Republican Donald Trump.
Quinnipiac poll results
Of those who replied, 50.0% said that they will vote for former New York Senator Hillary Clinton, while 44.0% indicated that they would give their vote to real estate developer Donald Trump.
This poll was conducted via phone from October 3 to October 5, among a random sample of 1064 likely voters. The margin of error is +/-3.1 points, which means that the poll results for the Democratic and the Republican candidate differ significantly.
Putting the results in context
As a general rule, however, you should not have too much faith in the results of single polls, because they sometimes contain large errors. At least, one should check how a poll's results compare to benchmark forecasts.
For the following analysis, we translate the candidates' raw poll numbers into two-party vote shares. This procedure results in figures of 53.2% for Clinton and 46.8% for Trump. For comparison: Only 50.5% was obtained by Clinton in the Quinnipiac poll on September 25, for Trump this number was 49.5%.
Results in comparison to other polls
Looking at an average of polls, Clinton's current two-party vote share is at 52.5%. This value is 0.7 percentage points lower than respective numbers in the Quinnipiac poll. This deviation is within the poll's margin of error, which means that the poll is not an outlier.
The poll in comparison with PollyVote's prediction
The current PollyVote foresees Clinton to gain 52.6% of the two-party vote. This means that Polly's forecast is 0.6 points below polling numbers. Again, a look at the poll's sampling error reveals that this difference is negligible.
