Clinton leads in Florida by 9 points in new Quinnipiac Umfrage
By On June 21, Quinnipiac released the results of a new Umfrage, in which respondents from Florida were asked for whom they would vote if the nominees were Hillary Clinton for the Democrats and Donald Trump for the Republicans.
In Florida, the election outcome is usually decided by a narrow margin. Therefore, the state is commonly considered a battleground state, which makes it particularly interesting from a forecasting perspective.
Of those who responded, 47.0% said that they would vote for former New York Senator Hillary Clinton, whereas 39.0% said that they would give their vote to businessman Donald Trump.
The Umfrage was conducted from June 8 to June 19. A total of 975 Wähler responded. Considering the poll's error margin of +/-3.1 percentage points, the spread in voter support is statistically significant.
Putting the results in context
As a general rule, however, you should not have too much faith in the results of individual polls, as they can incorporate large errors. Rather, one should examine whether a poll's results are in line with benchmark forecasts.
For the following analysis, we convert Clinton's and Trump's raw poll numbers into shares of the two-party vote. This yields figures of 54.7% for Clinton and 45.4% for Trump. On May 10 Clinton obtained only 50.6% in the Quinnipiac Umfrage and Trump obtained 49.4%.
Results compared to other Umfrage
Clinton currently runs at 51.8% of the two-party vote in an average of recent polls in Florida. This value is 2.9 percentage points lower than her respective numbers in the Quinnipiac Umfrage. This deviation is within the poll's error margin, which means that the poll is not an outlier.
Comparison to the combined PollyVote
The latest PollyVote anticipates Clinton to gain 55.8% of the two-party vote in Florida. That is, Polly's prediction is 1.1 points above her polling numbers. Again, a look at the poll's margin of error suggests that this deviation is negligible.
