Monmouth poll in Pennsylvania: Trump behind by 8 points
By Monmouth released the results of a new poll, in which respondents from Pennsylvania were asked for whom they will vote: Republican Donald Trump or Democrat Hillary Clinton.
Monmouth poll results
Of those who responded, 48.0% said that they intend to vote for former First Lady Hillary Clinton, whereas 40.0% declared that they would give their vote to billionaire Donald Trump.
The poll was conducted from August 26 to August 29 among 402 likely voters. The margin of error is +/-4.9 percentage points. This means that the levels of voter support for the Democratic and the Republican candidate do not differ significantly.
Putting the results in context
In general, however, you should not have too much faith in the results of single polls, since they sometimes contain large errors. Rather, one should check how a poll's results compare to benchmark forecasts.
To make the results comparable to benchmark forecasts, we translate them into shares of the two-party vote. This procedure results in values of 54.6% for Clinton and 45.5% for Trump.
Comparison to other polls
Looking at an average of Pennsylvania polls, Clinton's two-party vote share is currently at 54.7%. This value is 0.1 percentage points higher than her corresponding numbers in the Monmouth poll. This margin is within the poll's sampling error, which suggests 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. That is, the combined PollyVote is 0.1 points below her polling numbers. Again, a look at the poll's error margin shows that this deviation is insignificant.
