Pennsylvania: Healthy advantage for Clinton in new Monmouth poll
By Monmouth released the results of a new poll, in which respondents from Pennsylvania were asked for whom they will vote: Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton.
Monmouth poll results
The results show that 48.0% of respondents indicated to vote for former New York Senator Hillary Clinton, whereas 40.0% would vote for billionaire Donald Trump.
The poll was conducted from August 26 to August 29. A total of 402 likely voters responded. There is a sampling error of +/-4.9 percentage points. Considering this error margin, the race is currently a statistical tie.
Putting the results in context
In general, however, don't have too much faith in the results of single polls, because they sometimes contain large errors. Rather than trusting the results from single polls, the best practice scientific advice is to look at combined polls or, even better, a combined forecast that draws upon different methods and data.
For the following analysis, we convert Trump's and Clinton's raw poll numbers into shares of the two-party vote. This procedure yields figures of 54.6% for Clinton and 45.5% for Trump.
Comparison to other polls
An average of recent polls in Pennsylvania sees Clinton at 53.5% of the two-party vote. Relative to her numbers in the Monmouth poll Clinton's poll average is 1.1 percentage points worse. This deviation is within the poll's sampling error, which suggests that the poll is not an outlier.
The poll compared with PollyVote's prediction
The most recent PollyVote anticipates Clinton to gain 54.1% of the two-party vote in Pennsylvania. That is, Polly's combined forecast is 0.5 points below her polling numbers. The PollyVote forecast is therefore within the poll's error margin.
