Pennsylvania: New Franklin & Marshall poll shows Trump behind by 11 points

Results of a new poll carried out by Franklin & Marshall were distributed. The poll asked interviewees from Pennsylvania for whom they will vote: Republican Donald Trump or Democrat Hillary Clinton.

Of those who answered the question, 49.0% said that they plan to vote for former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, whereas 38.0% indicated that they would give their vote to billionaire Donald Trump.

The poll was conducted from July 29 to August 2. A total of 389 likely voters responded. There is a sampling error of +/-6.3 percentage points. Considering this error margin, the race is currently a statistical tie.

Putting the results in context

As a general rule, however, one should not have too much faith in the results of single polls, because they may contain large errors. Rather than relying on results from single polls, one should look at combined polls or, even better, the combined PollyVote forecast that relies on different methods and data.

To make the results comparable to forecasts from benchmark methods, you can translate them into shares of the two-party vote. This yields figures of 56.3% for Clinton and 43.7% for Trump. For comparison: Only 43.7% was obtained by Clinton in the Franklin & Marshall poll on August 20, for Trump this number was only 0.0%.

Results in comparison to other polls

Clinton is currently at 55.1% of the major two-party vote in an average of recent polls in Pennsylvania. This value is 1.2 percentage points lower than her respective numbers in the Franklin & Marshall poll. This deviation is within the poll's margin of error, which suggests that the poll is not an outlier.

Comparison to the combined PollyVote

The current PollyVote forecasts Clinton to gain 54.6% of the two-party vote in Pennsylvania. This means that the combined PollyVote is 1.7 points below her polling numbers. The PollyVote forecast is therefore within the poll's margin of error.

This article was automatically generated by the PollyBot, which uses algorithms developed by AX Semantics to generate text from data stored in our API. The exact dataset underlying this particular article can be found here.

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