New Ipsos/Reuters poll shows Clinton with 7 points lead
Ipsos/Reuters released the results of a new national poll, in which respondents were asked for whom they will vote: Democrat candidate Hillary Clinton or Republican candidate Donald Trump.
Ipsos/Reuters poll results
According to the results, 44.0% of respondents intend to give their vote to former First Lady Hillary Clinton, whereas 37.0% are going to vote for businessman Donald Trump.
The poll was carried out via Internet from October 6 to October 10 among 2363 likely voters. The sampling error is +/-2.1 points. This means that the levels of voter support for Clinton and Trump differ significantly.
Putting the results in context
In general, however, a good strategy is to not have too much faith in the results of single polls, because they may incorporate large errors. Instead of trusting the results from single polls, forecasting research recommends to rely on combined polls or, even better, the combined PollyVote forecast that relies on different methods and data.
For the following analysis, we convert Clinton's and Trump's raw poll numbers into shares of the two-party vote. This procedure yields values of 54.3% for Clinton and 45.7% for Trump. For comparison: Only 53.7% was gained by Clinton in the Ipsos/Reuters poll on September 26, for Trump this number was 46.3%.
Comparison to other polls
An average of recent polls has Clinton at 53.4% of the two-party vote. This value is 0.9 percentage points lower than respective numbers in the Ipsos/Reuters poll. This deviation is within the poll's margin of error, which suggests that the poll is not an outlier.
The poll compared with PollyVote's forecast
The current PollyVote foresees Clinton to gain 53.1% of the two-party vote. This means that the PollyVote forecast is 1.2 points below polling numbers. The PollyVote forecast is thus in line with the poll's sampling error.