Recent national polls have been very volatile. There was a time where all polls pointed in the same direction and were within a few points of each other. That is no longer the case. A perfect example is the last four national polls released: Two show Clinton +6, one Trump +5 and one Trump +2. How can polls taken within the same week be 11 points apart?
That said most polls are pointing to Clinton rebounding after bottoming around her episode with pneumonia. Although she is ahead in only 6 of the last 10 polls, 4 of those polls have her up by 5 or 6 points. Trump wins three polls by an average of 3 points.
Her lead seems to have bottomed on September 14th at 1.3%. That just so happens to be the last day she was off the campaign trail due to her health. Since then she has slowly regained momentum to get to her current 3% lead.
Here is a trend of the polls:
Here are the last 10 polls:
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 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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