Pennsylvania: Clinton with steady lead in Quinnipiac poll
By Results of a new poll administered by Quinnipiac were distributed. The poll asked interviewees from Pennsylvania for whom they will vote: Democrat Hillary Clinton or Republican Donald Trump.
Quinnipiac poll results
Of those who replied, 52.0% said that they intend to vote for former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, whereas 42.0% revealed that they would give their vote to billionaire Donald Trump.
This poll was conducted from July 30 to August 7, among a random sample of 815 likely voters. There is a sampling error of +/-3.4 percentage points. Considering this error margin, the gap between both candidates is statistically significant.
Putting the results in context
As a general rule, however, you should not have too much faith in the results of single polls, as they often contain large errors. Rather, one should check how a poll's results compare to benchmark forecasts.
In order to make the results comparable to benchmark forecasts, we convert them into two-party vote shares. This procedure yields values of 55.3% for Clinton and 44.7% for Trump.
Results in comparison to other polls
Looking at an average of Pennsylvania polls, Clinton's current two-party vote share is at 55.1%. In comparison to her numbers in the Quinnipiac poll Clinton's poll average is 0.2 percentage points lower. This margin is within the poll's error margin, which means that the poll is not an outlier.
The poll compared with PollyVote's prediction
The latest PollyVote expects Clinton to gain 54.6% of the two-party vote in Pennsylvania. That is, Polly's forecast is 0.7 points below her polling numbers. Again, a look at the poll's error margin shows that this deviation is insignificant.
