Florida: Clinton tied with Trump in latest NY Times/SienaNY Times/Siena poll
NY Times/SienaNY Times/Siena published the results of a new poll. In this poll, participants from Florida were asked for whom they will vote: Democrat Hillary Clinton or Republican Donald Trump.
Florida is traditionally a battleground state, where the Democratic and Republican candidates have historically achieved similar voter support. Therefore, the election outcome here is viewed as important in determining the overall result of the presidential election.
NY Times/SienaNY Times/Siena poll results
According to the results, both candidates have the exact same level of support, each with 43.0% of the vote.
This poll was conducted from September 10 to September 14, among a random sample of 867 likely voters. The margin of error is +/-3.3 points. This means that the poll results for the Democratic and the Republican candidate do not differ significantly.
Putting the results in context
As any other method, polls are subject to bias. Thus, as a general rule, one should not be overly confident the results of an individual poll. Rather than trusting the results from single polls, the best practice scientific advice is to consult combined polls or, even better, the combined PollyVote forecast that uses forecasts from different methods, each of which uses different data.
In order to make the results comparable to benchmark forecasts, you can convert them into two-party vote shares. The results of the actual poll mean 50.0 % for Clinton and 50.0 % for Trump in the two-party vote share.
Results compared to other polls
Clinton currently achieves 49.5% of the two-party vote according to an average of recent polls in Florida. In comparison to the average forecast of other polls Clinton performed 0.5 percentage points better in the poll. This difference is outside the poll's sampling error, which suggests that the poll is an outlier.
Results compared to the combined PollyVote forecast
The most recent PollyVote predicts Clinton to gain 51.0% and Trump 49.0% of the two-party vote in Florida. Clinton has 1 percentage points less when the results of the poll are compared to the combined PollyVote forecast for Florida. Again, a look at the poll's sampling error suggests that this deviation is significant.