Virginia: New Quinnipiac poll shows Trump behind by 12 points
By Quinnipiac released the results of a new poll, in which respondents from Virginia were asked for whom they will vote: Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton.
Virginia is traditionally a swing state, where the candidates of both major parties have historically achieved similar levels of support among voters. This is the reason why the election outcome in that state is considered critical in determining the overall result of the presidential election.
Quinnipiac poll results
Of those who responded, 50.0% said that they would vote for former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, while 38.0% revealed that they would give their vote to businessman Donald Trump.
The poll was carried out from August 9 to August 16 among 808 likely voters. Taking into account the poll's sampling error of +/-3.5 percentage points, the difference between both candidates is statistically significant.
Putting the results in context
As any other method, polls are subject to bias. Thus, as a general rule, a good strategy is to not focus too much on the results of a single poll. Rather than trusting the results from single polls, the best practice scientific advice is to rely on 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, one can convert them into shares of the two-party vote. This procedure results in figures of 56.8% for Clinton and 43.2% for Trump.
Results vs. other polls
Looking at an average of Virginia polls, Clinton's current two-party vote share is at 52.9%. This value is 3.9 percentage points lower than her corresponding numbers in the Quinnipiac poll. This difference is outside the poll's margin of error, which means that the poll is an outlier.
Results compared to the combined PollyVote prediction
The current PollyVote anticipates Clinton to gain 52.4% of the two-party vote in Virginia. Hence, Polly's combined forecast is 4.4 points below her polling numbers. The PollyVote forecast is thus outside the poll's error margin.
