How close are Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton in the polls?
US presidential elections 2016: How close are Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton in the polls?
Now that it looks like both Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton have secured their party's nomination for the presidential race, the clash between the two candidates is set to be brutal.
American politics is likely to be dominated by the race to replace Barack Obama in the White House until election day on 8 November.
Follow our poll tracker to keep on track on who's top. It takes an average of the last five polls published on RealClearPolitics.
19 May 2016 was the first time that Republican Donald Trump pulled ahead of Democrat Hillary Clinton in the average of national polls. He was, on average, 0.2 percentage points ahead of Clinton on May 22 - leading to some claiming "it's probably time to panic" - although the next poll put Clinton back ahead.
Clinton had held a lengthy double-digit lead over Trump, who was once a Republican outsider - but this has now vanished.
The lead may be seen as more significant at the later stage, as it is now near-confirmed that Clinton and Trump will be facing each other in the presidential election.
A word of caution, however: polling so far away from the election is unlikely to be reflective of the final score. A lot can change.
The New York Times has worked out that, at this point, a simple polling average has differed from the final result by about nine percentage points.
Trump's polling has previously drawn close to Clinton's during last October, as his appearance on Saturday Night Live coincided with Clinton facing pressure in a trial on the deaths of four Americans in Libya in 2012.
Why are the US election polls so close?
One of the reasons that the polls seem to be closing is that the Republicans are starting to rally behind Trump. Meanwhile, a recent YouGov poll showed that just over half of supporters of Bernie Sanders - Clinton's Democratic rival - would back Clinton.
Sanders also polls against Trump better than Clinton. 61 per cent of his backers view Mrs Clinton unfavourably, while 72 per cent say she is "not honest and trustworthy".
Still, Clinton holds a big demographic advantage over Trump. A Washington Post poll indicated that 69 per cent of non-whites and 52 per cent women favour Clinton, while 57 per cent of whites and men support Trump.
What about the American states?
When it actually comes to the final presidential race, the Democrat and Republican candidates will go head to head to win the 50 American states - each of which has a certain number of electoral college votes, based on population.
This system matters, as the popular vote is less important than the electoral college vote. If Clinton's campaign is buoyed by big Democratic states such as New York, New Jersey, Illinois and California, these populous states could lead her to victory.
For example, in 2008, Barack Obama won 53 per cent of the vote - but this led to 68 per cent of the electoral college vote. Such highly populated states played a big part in this when they backed the current president.
Swing states - states that regularly switch between Democrat and Republican between elections - are also important.
States like Arizona, Florida, North Carolina, Ohio and West Virginia have the power to swing the election. So far, neither Trump nor Clinton has a significant lead in these crucial states.
What are the odds on the American presidential election?
It has long been said of predicting sporting outcomes that the bookies don’t get it far wrong, working out probabilities with complicated mathematics based on the choices of their thousands of paying punters.
After last year’s surprise General Election result, many political followers have lost faith in pollsters and prefer to look at the odds to predict the future.
Hillary Clinton has been odds-on favourite since the end of February, but Trump has steadily caught her up as his Republican rivals dropped out. Last July he was a 25/1 shot while Hillary was already at evens.
PaddyPower’s latest odds for the next US president are:
Hilary Clinton 4/11
Donald Trump 9/4
Bernie Sanders 16/1
Joe Biden 33/1
US presidential elections 2016: How close are Donald Trump and ...
