6 points lead for Clinton in latest NBC/SurveyMonkey poll
By NBC/SurveyMonkey released the results of a new national poll, in which respondents were asked for whom they will vote: Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton.
NBC/SurveyMonkey poll results
Of those who responded, 50.0% said that they would vote for former New York Senator Hillary Clinton, whereas 44.0% indicated that they would give their vote to billionaire Donald Trump.
The poll was carried out via Internet from October 17 to October 23 among 32225 likely voters. There is a sampling error of +/-0.6 percentage points. Considering this error margin, the gap between both candidates is statistically significant.
Putting the results in context
As any other method, polls are subject to bias. Thus, as a general rule, you should not put too much trust in the results of a single poll. Rather, one should examine how a poll's results compare to benchmark forecasts.
To make the results comparable to forecasts from benchmark methods, one can convert them into shares of the two-party vote. This yields figures of 53.2% for Clinton and 46.8% for Trump. On September 25 Clinton received 53.7% in the NBC/SurveyMonkey poll and Trump received only 46.3%.
Results compared to other polls
Clinton is currently at 53.5% of the major two-party vote in an average of recent polls. This value is 0.3 percentage points higher than respective numbers in the NBC/SurveyMonkey poll. This margin is within the poll's margin of error, which suggests that the poll is not an outlier.
Results compared to the combined PollyVote forecast
The latest PollyVote expects Clinton to gain 54.1% of the two-party vote. Hence, Polly's combined forecast is 0.9 points above polling numbers. Again, a look at the poll's sampling error suggests that this difference is significant.
