Polling has become very inconsistent the last few days. As an example, two well known polls released the same day (Sunday) covering the same time period (Monday-Thursday) had a 7 point difference: The ABC News/Wash Post Poll had Clinton up by 4 points while NBC News/Wall St Journal Poll had Clinton by 11.
Averaging the polls takes away some of this noise and shows broader trends. Polling taken through Thursday shows Clinton with a 5.6% lead. The lead has been between 5.6% and 5.8% the last four days since moving up from Sunday’s 4.2%. By comparison, Clinton’s biggest lead post the DNC was at 6.8%. Trump may have started to cut into the lead a bit. It peaked on Tuesday at 5.8%. That is consistent with what we have seen from prior events: Clinton takes a big jump up after an organized event (DNC, first debate, second debate/tapes) and Trump starts cutting into that lead immediately after over a longer period of time.
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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