South Carolina: Trump with slight advantage in recent PPP (D)PPP (D) poll
PPP (D)PPP (D) published the results of a new poll. In this poll, respondents from South Carolina were asked for whom they will vote: Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton.
PPP (D)PPP (D) poll results
The results show that 42.0% of interviewees will vote for former First Lady Hillary Clinton, whereas 47.0% plan to vote for businessman Donald Trump.
The poll was in the field between November 7 and November 8. The sample size was 1290 registered voters. The sampling error is +/-2.7 points, which means that the levels of voter support for Trump and Clinton differ significantly.
Putting the results in context
As any other method, polls are subject to bias. Hence, a good strategy is to not have too much faith in the results of an individual poll. Instead of relying on results from single polls, research in forecasting recommends to look at combined polls or, even better, a combined forecast that draws upon different methods and data.
In order to make the results comparable to benchmark forecasts, one can convert them into two-party vote shares. This procedure results in figures of 47.2% for Clinton and 52.8% for Trump. To compare: 52.8% was gained by Clinton in the PPP (D)PPP (D) poll on August 7, for Trump this result was only 0.0%.
Results compared to other polls
An average of recent polls in South Carolina has Trump at 55.0% of the two-party vote. This value is 2.2 percentage points higher than his corresponding numbers in the PPP (D)PPP (D) poll. This deviation is within the poll's error margin, which means that the poll is not an outlier.
Comparison to the combined PollyVote
The current PollyVote anticipates Trump to gain 55.4% of the two-party vote in South Carolina. Hence, Polly's prediction is 2.6 points above his polling numbers. Again, a look at the poll's sampling error reveals that this difference is negligible.