10 points lead for Clinton in latest NBC/WSJ poll
NBC/WSJ released the results of a new national poll, in which respondents were asked for whom they will vote: Democrat Hillary Clinton or Republican Donald Trump.
NBC/WSJ poll results
Of those who answered the question, 51.0% said that they are going to vote for former New York Senator Hillary Clinton, while 41.0% indicated that they would give their vote to billionaire Donald Trump.
The poll was conducted from October 10 to October 13 via phone. A total of 905 likely voters responded. There is a sampling error of +/-3.3 percentage points. Considering this error margin, the gap between both candidates is statistically significant.
Putting the results in context
Single polls should be treated with caution, as they often incorporate large errors. At least, one should check how a poll's results compare to benchmark forecasts.
In order to make the results comparable to forecasts from other methods, we convert them into shares of the two-party vote. This yields figures of 55.4% for Clinton and 44.6% for Trump. In the most recent NBC/WSJ poll on October 10 Clinton received 55.6%, while Trump received only 44.4%.
Results compared to other polls
If we look at an average of polls, Clinton's current two-party vote share is at 53.6%. This value is 1.8 percentage points lower than respective numbers in the NBC/WSJ poll. This deviation is within the poll's error margin, which means that the poll is not an outlier.
The poll in comparison with PollyVote's forecast
The most recent PollyVote predicts Clinton to gain 53.9% of the two-party vote. This means that the PollyVote is 1.5 points below polling numbers. Again, a look at the poll's error margin suggests that this difference is negligible.