Florida: 7 points lead for Clinton in new NBC-WSJ-Marist poll
By NBC-WSJ-Marist released the results of a new poll, in which respondents from Florida were asked for whom they will vote: Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump.
Historically, Florida has been a purple state, in which neither the Democrats nor the Republicans have had overwhelming support to clinch that state's electoral college votes. Therefore, forecasts here are of particular value.
NBC-WSJ-Marist poll results
According to the results, 44.0% of respondents said that they would give their vote to former First Lady Hillary Clinton, whereas 37.0% said that they would give their vote to businessman Donald Trump.
The poll was conducted from July 5 to July 11. A total of 871 registered voters responded. The margin of error is +/-3.3 points, which means that the levels of voter support for Clinton and Trump differ significantly.
Putting the results in context
As any other method, polls are subject to bias. As a result, one should not rely too much on the results of an individual poll. Rather than trusting the results from single polls, we recommend to use combined polls or, even better, the combined PollyVote forecast that relies on forecasts from different methods, each of which relies on different data.
In order to make the results comparable to benchmark forecasts, we translate them into two-party vote shares. This procedure results in figures of 54.3% for Clinton and 45.7% for Trump.
Results vs. other polls
If we look at an average of Florida polls, Clinton's two-party vote share is currently at 49.8%. Relative to her numbers in the NBC-WSJ-Marist poll Clinton's poll average is 4.5 percentage points lower. This margin is outside the poll's sampling error, which suggests that the poll is an outlier.
Comparison to the combined PollyVote
The current PollyVote predicts Clinton to gain 49.7% of the two-party vote in Florida. That is, Polly's prediction is 4.6 points below her polling numbers. The PollyVote forecast is therefore outside the poll's margin of error.
