North Carolina: Trump and Clinton virtually tied in latest Suffolk University poll
By Suffolk University published the results of a new poll. In this poll, participants from North Carolina were asked for whom they will vote: Democrat candidate Hillary Clinton or Republican candidate Donald Trump.
Suffolk University poll results
Of those who replied, 41.0% said that they plan to vote for former New York Senator Hillary Clinton, while 44.0% said that they would give their vote to businessman Donald Trump.
The poll was conducted from September 5 to September 7. A total of 500 likely voters responded. Considering the poll's error margin of +/-4.4 percentage points, the results reflect a statistical tie.
Putting the results in context
As any other method, polls are subject to bias. Hence, you should not focus too much on the results of a single poll. Rather than trusting the results from single polls, one should use combined polls or, even better, a combined forecast that uses different methods and data.
To make the results comparable to forecasts from other methods, you can translate them into two-party vote shares. This procedure results in values of 48.2% for Clinton and 51.8% for Trump.
Comparison to other polls
An average of recent polls in North Carolina sees Trump at 49.8% of the two-party vote. This value is 2 percentage points lower than her respective numbers in the Suffolk University poll. This margin is within the poll's error margin, which means that the poll is not an outlier.
Comparison to the combined PollyVote
The most recent PollyVote anticipates Trump to gain 49.8% of the two-party vote in North Carolina. That is, the PollyVote forecast is 2.0 points below her polling numbers. Again, a look at the poll's sampling error indicates that this deviation is insignificant.
