Latest ABC/Post poll: Trump trails by a clear margin
By ABC/Post released the results of a new national poll, in which respondents were asked for whom they will vote: Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump.
ABC/Post poll results
Of those who responded, 51.0% said that they will vote for former New York Senator Hillary Clinton, while 44.0% said that they would give their vote to real estate developer Donald Trump.
The poll was conducted from October 22 to October 25 via phone. A total of 1135 likely voters responded. The sampling error is +/-3.0 percentage points, which means that the levels of voter support for the Democratic and the Republican candidate differ significantly.
Putting the results in context
As any other method, polls are subject to bias. Thus, as a general rule, don't be overly confident the results of an individual poll. Instead of trusting the results from single polls, forecasting research recommends to look at combined polls or, even better, the combined PollyVote forecast that incorporates different methods and data.
In order to make the results comparable to forecasts from other methods, we translate them into two-party vote shares. This procedure results in figures of 53.7% for Clinton and 46.3% for Trump. In the most recent ABC/Post poll on October 13 Clinton received only 52.1%, while Trump received 47.9%.
Comparison to other polls
Looking at an average of polls, Clinton's two-party vote share is currently at 53.4%. This value is 0.3 percentage points lower than respective numbers in the ABC/Post poll. This difference is within the poll's sampling error, which means that the poll is not an outlier.
The poll compared with PollyVote's prediction
The current PollyVote anticipates Clinton to gain 54.0% of the two-party vote. Hence, the PollyVote is 0.3 points above polling numbers. The PollyVote forecast is thus within the poll's error margin.
