Clinton and Trump virtually tied in latest IBD/TIPP poll
By IBD/TIPP released the results of a new national poll, in which respondents were asked for whom they will vote: Republican nominee Donald Trump or Democrat nominee Hillary Clinton.
IBD/TIPP poll results
Of those who answered the question, 43.0% said that they would vote for former First Lady Hillary Clinton, while 42.0% said that they would give their vote to businessman Donald Trump.
This poll was conducted via phone from November 3 to November 6, among a random sample of 1026 likely voters. The error margin is +/-3.1 percentage points. This means that the poll results for the Republican and the Democratic candidate do not differ significantly.
Putting the results in context
As a general rule, however, you should not have too much faith in the results of single polls, as they can incorporate large errors. Rather than relying on results from single polls, forecasting research recommends to look at combined polls or, even better, a combined forecast that relies on different methods and data.
To make the results comparable to forecasts from benchmark methods, you can convert them into shares of the two-party vote. The resulting figures are 50.6% for Clinton and 49.4% for Trump.
Comparison to other polls
Looking at an average of polls, Clinton's two-party vote share is currently at 51.9%. This value is 1.3 percentage points higher than her respective numbers in the IBD/TIPP poll. This difference is within the poll's margin of error, which suggests that the poll is not an outlier.
Comparison to the combined PollyVote
The most recent PollyVote predicts Clinton to gain 52.5% of the two-party vote. Hence, the combined PollyVote is 1.9 points above her polling numbers. Again, a look at the poll's sampling error indicates that this difference is negligible.
