New The Atlantic poll: Trump trails by a strong margin
By The Atlantic released the results of a new national poll, in which respondents were asked for whom they will vote: Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump.
The Atlantic poll results
Of those who answered the question, 49.0% said that they will vote for former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, while 38.0% indicated that they would give their vote to billionaire Donald Trump.
The poll was conducted from October 5 to October 9. A total of 886 respondents responded. There is a sampling error of +/-3.9 percentage points. Considering this error margin, the gap between both candidates is statistically significant.
Putting the results in context
Individual polls often contain large biases, and should be interpreted with caution. Instead of relying on results from single polls, research in forecasting recommends to rely on combined polls or, even better, the combined PollyVote forecast that draws upon forecasts from different methods, each of which draws upon different data.
In order to make the results comparable to benchmark forecasts, one can translate them into shares of the two-party vote. This yields figures of 56.3% for Clinton and 43.7% for Trump. On October 2 Clinton received only 53.4% in the The Atlantic poll and Trump received 46.6%.
Comparison to other polls
Clinton currently achieves 53.6% of the major two-party vote according to an average of recent polls. This value is 2.7 percentage points lower than corresponding numbers in the The Atlantic poll. This deviation is within the poll's sampling error, which means that the poll is not an outlier.
Comparison to the combined PollyVote
The most recent PollyVote anticipates Clinton to gain 52.9% of the two-party vote. That is, the PollyVote forecast is 3.4 points below polling numbers. The PollyVote forecast is therefore in line with the poll's sampling error.
