Pennsylvania: Clinton and Trump neck-and-neck in new Emerson poll
By Results of a new poll conducted by Emerson were circulated. The poll asked respondents from Pennsylvania for whom they will vote: Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump.
Emerson poll results
Of those who responded, 46.0% said that they would vote for former First Lady Hillary Clinton, whereas 43.0% said that they would give their vote to real estate developer Donald Trump.
The poll was conducted from August 25 to August 28. A total of 800 likely voters responded. There is a sampling error of +/-3.4 percentage points. Considering this error margin, the race is currently a statistical tie.
Putting the results in context
As any other method, polls are subject to bias. As a result, you should not focus too much on the results of an individual poll. At the very least, one should check how a poll's results compare to benchmark forecasts.
For the following analysis, we translate the candidates' raw poll numbers into two-party vote shares. This procedure results in values of 51.7% for Clinton and 48.3% for Trump.
Results in comparison to other polls
Clinton can currently count on 53.8% of the two-party vote according to an average of recent polls in Pennsylvania. Compared to her numbers in the Emerson poll Clinton's poll average is 2.1 percentage points higher. This margin is within the poll's sampling error, which means that the poll is not an outlier.
The poll compared with PollyVote's forecast
The current PollyVote anticipates Clinton to gain 54.1% of the two-party vote in Pennsylvania. That is, the PollyVote forecast is 2.4 points above her polling numbers. Again, a look at the poll's error margin suggests that this deviation is negligible.
