4 points lead for Clinton in latest CBS poll
CBS released the results of a new national poll, in which respondents were asked for whom they will vote: Republican Donald Trump or Democrat Hillary Clinton.
CBS poll results
Of those who replied, 47.0% said that they plan to vote for former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, while 43.0% indicated that they would give their vote to billionaire Donald Trump.
The poll was carried out from November 2 to November 6 with 1426 participants. Taking into account the poll's sampling error of +/-3.0 percentage points, the results reflect a statistical tie.
Putting the results in context
As any other method, polls are subject to bias. In general, don't have too much confidence in the results of an individual poll. At the very least, one should check how a poll's results compare to benchmark forecasts.
In order to make the results comparable to benchmark forecasts, one can translate them into two-party vote shares. This yields figures of 52.2% for Clinton and 47.8% for Trump. For comparison: 56.0% was obtained by Clinton in the CBS poll on October 16, for Trump this number was only 44.0%.
Comparison to other polls
Looking at an average of polls, Clinton's two-party vote share is currently at 51.8%. In comparison to her numbers in the CBS poll Clinton's poll average is 0.4 percentage points worse. This margin is within the poll's error margin, which means that the poll is not an outlier.
The poll compared with PollyVote's prediction
The latest PollyVote foresees Clinton to gain 52.5% of the two-party vote. This means that Polly's prediction is 0.3 points above her polling numbers. Again, a look at the poll's margin of error indicates that this deviation is negligible.