7 points lead for Clinton in new Reuters poll
By Reuters published the results of a new national poll. In this poll, interviewees were asked for whom they will vote: Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton.
Reuters poll results
The results show that 44.0% of interviewees indicated that they would give their vote to former First Lady Hillary Clinton, while 37.0% plan to vote for businessman Donald Trump.
This poll was conducted from October 6 to October 10, among a random sample of 2363 participants. The sampling error is +/-2.2 percentage points. This means that the levels of voter support for Clinton and Trump differ significantly.
Putting the results in context
Individual polls should be regarded with caution, since they may incorporate substantial errors. Rather than trusting the results from single polls, forecasting research recommends to consult combined polls or, even better, the combined PollyVote forecast that includes forecasts from different methods, each of which draws upon different data.
To make the results comparable to forecasts from other methods, one can translate them into shares of the two-party vote. This procedure yields values of 54.3% for Clinton and 45.7% for Trump.
Comparison to other polls
Clinton currently runs at 53.5% of the two-party vote according to an average of recent polls. Compared to numbers in the Reuters poll Clinton's poll average is 0.8 percentage points lower. This deviation is within the poll's sampling error, which means that the poll is not an outlier.
Comparison to the combined PollyVote
The latest PollyVote foresees Clinton to gain 54.0% of the two-party vote. This means that Polly's forecast is 0.3 points below polling numbers. Again, a look at the poll's sampling error reveals that this difference is negligible.
