Latest Franklin & Marshall poll in Pennsylvania: Trump trails by a healthy margin

Franklin & Marshall released the results of a new poll, in which respondents from Pennsylvania were asked for whom they will vote: Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump.

Of those who answered the question, 47.0% said that they intend to vote for former First Lady Hillary Clinton, whereas 40.0% indicated that they would give their vote to billionaire Donald Trump.

The poll was in the field between August 25 and August 29. The sample size was 496 likely voters. The sampling error is +/-5.6 points. This means that the poll results for both parties' candidates do not differ significantly.

Putting the results in context

Single polls should be treated with caution, because they often incorporate substantial biases. Rather than trusting the results from single polls, forecasting research recommends to look at combined polls or, even better, a combined forecast that draws upon forecasts from different methods, each of which draws upon different data.

To make the results comparable to benchmark forecasts, we translate them into shares of the two-party vote. The respective figures are 54.0% for Clinton and 46.0% for Trump.

Results in comparison to other polls

Looking at an average of Pennsylvania polls, Clinton's current two-party vote share is at 53.4%. This value is 0.6 percentage points lower than her respective numbers in the Franklin & Marshall poll. This difference is within the poll's error margin, which means that the poll is not an outlier.

Results compared to the combined PollyVote forecast

The latest PollyVote forecasts Clinton to gain 54.1% of the two-party vote in Pennsylvania. Hence, the combined PollyVote is 0.1 points above her polling numbers. The PollyVote forecast is therefore in line with the poll's sampling 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.

Please let us know if you find any typos, missing words, or grammatical errors. Your feedback helps us to further improve the quality of the texts.