Pennsylvania: Virtual tie between Trump and Clinton in new Emerson poll
By Emerson released the results of a new poll, in which respondents from Pennsylvania were asked for whom they will vote: Democrat Hillary Clinton or Republican Donald Trump.
Emerson poll results
Of those who answered the question, 46.0% said that they are going to vote for former New York Senator Hillary Clinton, whereas 43.0% declared that they would give their vote to real estate developer Donald Trump.
The poll was carried out from August 25 to August 28 with 800 likely voters. 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 a general rule, however, don't have too much faith in the results of single polls, because they sometimes contain large errors. Instead of trusting the results from single polls, research in forecasting recommends to rely on combined polls or, even better, the combined PollyVote forecast that includes different methods and data.
To make the results comparable to forecasts from benchmark methods, you can translate them into two-party vote shares. This procedure yields values of 51.7% for Clinton and 48.3% for Trump.
Results in comparison to other polls
Looking at an average of Pennsylvania polls, Clinton's current two-party vote share is at 53.8%. This value is 2.1 percentage points higher than her respective numbers in the Emerson poll. This difference is within the poll's sampling error, which suggests that the poll is not an outlier.
Results compared to the combined PollyVote forecast
The current PollyVote foresees Clinton to gain 54.2% of the two-party vote in Pennsylvania. Hence, Polly's combined forecast is 2.5 points above her polling numbers. Again, a look at the poll's margin of error reveals that this difference is insignificant.
