Quinnipiac poll in Colorado: Clinton with 10 points lead
By Quinnipiac released the results of a new poll, in which respondents from Colorado were asked for whom they will vote: Democrat Hillary Clinton or Republican Donald Trump.
Colorado is traditionally a purple state, where Republicans and Democrats have often won similar levels of voter support. This is the reason why the election outcome in that state is viewed as crucial in determining who will win the majority of electoral votes.
Quinnipiac poll results
The results show that 49.0% of participants plan to vote for former New York Senator Hillary Clinton, whereas 39.0% plan to vote for businessman Donald Trump.
The poll was carried out from August 9 to August 16 among 830 likely voters. The margin of error is +/-3.4 percentage points, which means that the poll results for the candidates of both parties differ significantly.
Putting the results in context
Single polls often contain large errors, which is why they should be treated with caution. Instead of trusting the results from single polls, the best practice scientific advice is to rely on combined polls or, even better, a combined forecast that relies on different methods and data.
In order to make the results comparable to forecasts from benchmark methods, you can translate them into two-party vote shares. This procedure yields figures of 55.7% for Clinton and 44.3% for Trump. For comparison: Only 43.5% was gained by Clinton in the Quinnipiac poll on April 26, for Trump this result was 56.5%.
Comparison to other polls
An average of recent polls in Colorado sees Clinton at 57.0% of the two-party vote. This value is 1.3 percentage points higher than her respective numbers in the Quinnipiac poll. This deviation is within the poll's margin of error, which suggests that the poll is not an outlier.
Comparison to the combined PollyVote
The most recent PollyVote predicts Clinton to gain 56.4% of the two-party vote in Colorado. This means that Polly's prediction is 0.7 points above her polling numbers. The PollyVote forecast is thus in line with the poll's sampling error.
