Narrow lead for Clinton in recent Politico/Morning Consult poll
By Politico/Morning Consult 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.
Politico/Morning Consult poll results
Of those who responded, 46.0% said that they intend to vote for former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, while 41.0% indicated that they would give their vote to real estate developer Donald Trump.
The Internet poll was carried out between October 13 and October 15. The sample size was 1737 likely voters. Given the poll's sampling error of +/-2.4 percentage points, the spread in voter support is statistically significant.
Putting the results in context
As any other method, polls are subject to bias. Therefore, as a general rule, you should not be too confident the results of an individual poll. Rather, one should check how a poll's results compare to benchmark forecasts.
To make the results comparable to benchmark forecasts, you can convert them into two-party vote shares. This procedure results in figures of 52.9% for Clinton and 47.1% for Trump. For comparison: Only 52.3% was obtained by Clinton in the Politico/Morning Consult poll on October 8, for Trump this result was 47.7%.
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 0.7 percentage points higher than corresponding numbers in the Politico/Morning Consult poll. This deviation is within the poll's sampling error, which suggests that the poll is not an outlier.
Results compared to the combined PollyVote forecast
The current PollyVote expects Clinton to gain 54.0% of the two-party vote. Hence, the combined PollyVote is 1.1 points above polling numbers. The PollyVote forecast is thus within the poll's sampling error.
