With many national polls being released on a daily basis showing conflicting information, it’s useful to step back and look at an average of the polls on a longer term. That’s the intent of this post.  See below for specifics on methodology.

As of 7/22, the poll shows Trump at 45.4% and Clinton at 45.3%.  This is the first time Trump has been ahead of Clinton since May 24th.

Hillary Clinton had as much of a lead as 7.4% in the middle of June (Pre FBI investigation and RNC)

Candidates are known to get bumps from conventions.  It will be interesting seeing where these same polls stand after the DNC next week.

Here is a trend of the polls:

Here are the last 10 polls used in the tracking:

Of course the election is not about national polls and popular votes.  It’s about the electoral college.  Please see previous posts or click below for updated  state by state forecast of the electoral outcome.

Click here for a state by state forecast of the elections

Click here for running list of forecast changes

Click here for results from last 5 elections

Follow me @2016ElectOdds for updates

Methodology:

• Use all national polls listed at Real Clear Politics
• Weigh the outcomes by the sample size of each poll
• Account for the different days spanned for the poll by allocating it out across the days.
• Example a poll of 1000 voters taken across 7/2-7/5 would have a weighting of 250 voters for each of those days
• For each day, take the previous weighted 7 days worth of poll data to compute a percentage for each candidate.  The rolling 7 days decreases the impact of large polls taken on a single day (large sample electronic polls)

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