Pennsylvania: Virtual tie between Clinton and Trump in latest Quinnipiac poll
On June 21, Quinnipiac released the results of a new poll, in which respondents from Pennsylvania were asked for whom they would vote if the nominees were Hillary Clinton for the Democratic Party and Donald Trump for the Republican Party.
According to the results, 42.0% of interviewees said that they would vote for former First Lady Hillary Clinton, whereas 41.0% would vote for billionaire Donald Trump.
The poll was conducted from June 8 to June 19. A total of 950 registered voters responded. There is a sampling error of +/-3.2 percentage points. Considering this error margin, the race is currently a statistical tie.
Putting the results in context
Individual polls may incorporate large errors, which is why they should be interpreted with caution. Rather, one should check whether a poll's results are in line with benchmark forecasts.
In order to put the poll results on equal footing with forecasts from other methods, we convert them into shares of the two-party vote. This procedure yields values of 50.6% for Clinton and 49.4% for Trump.
Results in comparison to other polls
Looking at an average of Pennsylvania polls, Clinton's two-party vote share is currently at 50.3%. This value is 0.3 percentage points lower than her corresponding numbers in the Quinnipiac poll. This difference is within the poll's margin of error, which means that the poll is not an outlier.
Comparison to the combined PollyVote
The latest PollyVote predicts Clinton to gain 57.7% of the two-party vote in Pennsylvania. Hence, the PollyVote forecast is 7.1 points above her polling numbers. The PollyVote forecast is therefore outside the poll's margin of error.