Latest Emerson*Emerson* poll in Pennsylvania: Trump and Clinton in a virtual tie
By Results of a new poll carried out by EmersonEmerson were announced. The poll asked participants from Pennsylvania for whom they will vote: Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump.
EmersonEmerson poll results
Of those who responded, 46.0% said that they are going to vote for former New York Senator Hillary Clinton, while 43.0% said that they would give their vote to billionaire Donald Trump.
The poll was carried out from August 25 to August 28 with 800 likely voters. If one takes into account the poll's sampling error of +/-3.4 percentage points, the results reflect a statistical tie.
Putting the results in context
As any other method, polls are subject to bias. Thus, as a general rule, one should not have too much faith in the results of a single poll. At least, one should check how a poll's results compare to benchmark forecasts.
In order to make the results comparable to benchmark forecasts, one can translate them into shares of the two-party vote. This yields figures of 51.7% for Clinton and 48.3% for Trump.
Results compared to other polls
Clinton currently runs at 54.6% of the major two-party vote in an average of recent polls in Pennsylvania. This value is 2.9 percentage points higher than her corresponding numbers in the EmersonEmerson poll. This margin is within the poll's sampling error, which means that the poll is not an outlier.
Comparison to the combined PollyVote
The latest PollyVote foresees Clinton to gain 54.5% of the two-party vote in Pennsylvania. This means that the combined PollyVote is 2.8 points above her polling numbers. Again, a look at the poll's error margin shows that this deviation is negligible.
