Colorado: Dead heat between Clinton and Trump in latest CBS News/YouGovCBS/YouGov poll
By CBS News/YouGovCBS/YouGov released the results of a new poll, in which respondents from Colorado were asked for whom they would vote if the nominees were Hillary Clinton for the Democrats and Donald Trump for the GOP.
In Colorado, the popular vote is often close. This is why the state is commonly considered a battleground state, which makes it particularly interesting from a forecasting perspective.
The results show that 40.0% of interviewees indicated that they would cast a ballot for former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, whereas 39.0% plan to vote for real estate developer Donald Trump.
This poll was conducted from June 21 to June 24, among a random sample of 996 likely voters. There is a sampling error of +/-4.3 percentage points. Considering this error margin, the race is currently a statistical tie.
Putting the results in context
As a general rule, however, don't have too much faith in the results of an individual poll, since they may incorporate large errors. At the very least, one should examine whether the results from a single poll are comparable to benchmark forecasts.
In order to put the poll results on equal footing with forecasts from benchmark 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.
Comparison to the combined PollyVote
The latest PollyVote predicts Clinton to gain 63.5% of the two-party vote in Colorado. Hence, Polly's combined forecast is 12.9 points above her polling numbers. Again, a look at the poll's margin of error reveals that this deviation is significant.
