New Ipsos/Reuters poll: Clinton holds marginal advantage
Ipsos/Reuters published the results of a new national poll. In this poll, participants were asked for whom they will vote: Republican Donald Trump or Democrat Hillary Clinton.
Ipsos/Reuters poll results
Of those who replied, 43.0% said that they plan to vote for former New York Senator Hillary Clinton, while 39.0% indicated that they would give their vote to real estate developer Donald Trump.
This poll was conducted via Internet from October 13 to October 17, among a random sample of 1190 likely voters. The sampling error is +/-2.9 points, which means that the poll results for Trump and Clinton do not differ significantly.
Putting the results in context
As any other method, polls are subject to bias. Therefore, as a general rule, don't be overly confident the results of an individual poll. Rather, one should examine how a poll's results compare to benchmark forecasts.
For the following comparison, we convert Trump's and Clinton's raw poll numbers into shares of the two-party vote. This procedure yields values of 52.4% for Clinton and 47.6% for Trump. To compare: 53.7% was obtained by Clinton in the Ipsos/Reuters poll on September 26, for Trump this result was only 46.3%.
Results in comparison to other polls
Clinton can currently count on 53.6% of the major two-party vote according to an average of recent polls. Relative to numbers in the Ipsos/Reuters poll Clinton's poll average is 1.2 percentage points better. This margin is within the poll's sampling error, which means that the poll is not an outlier.
Comparison to the combined PollyVote
The current PollyVote anticipates Clinton to gain 53.9% of the two-party vote. This means that Polly's combined forecast is 1.5 points above polling numbers. The PollyVote forecast is therefore in line with the poll's margin of error.