New IBD poll: Clinton and Trump in a virtual tie
By IBD released the results of a new national poll, in which respondents were asked for whom they will vote: Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump.
IBD poll results
Of those who responded, 44.0% said that they would vote for former First Lady Hillary Clinton, whereas 41.0% indicated that they would give their vote to billionaire Donald Trump.
The poll was conducted from October 13 to October 18 among 782 participants. The sampling error is +/-3.6 percentage points, which means that the poll results for both candidates do not differ significantly.
Putting the results in context
As any other method, polls are subject to bias. Thus, as a general rule, a good strategy is to not have too much confidence in the results of an individual poll. Rather than trusting the results from single polls, we recommend to rely on combined polls or, even better, a combined forecast that draws upon forecasts from different methods, each of which draws upon different data.
For the following analysis, we translate Clinton's and Trump's raw poll numbers into two-party vote shares. This procedure results in values of 51.8% for Clinton and 48.2% for Trump. To compare: Only 49.4% was obtained by Clinton in the IBD poll on September 1, for Trump this result was only 0.0%.
Results in comparison to other polls
Clinton currently runs at 53.6% of the major two-party vote according to an average of recent polls. In comparison to numbers in the IBD poll Clinton's poll average is 1.8 percentage points higher. This margin 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. Hence, Polly's combined forecast is 2.1 points above polling numbers. Again, a look at the poll's margin of error suggests that this deviation is negligible.
