Georgia: Dead heat between Clinton and Trump in new Monmouth poll
By Monmouth published the results of a new poll. In this poll, participants from Georgia were asked for whom they will vote: Republican nominee Donald Trump or Democrat nominee Hillary Clinton.
Monmouth poll results
Of those who answered the question, 42.0% said that they plan to vote for former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, whereas 45.0% declared that they would give their vote to real estate developer Donald Trump.
The poll was carried out from September 15 to September 18 with 401 likely voters. Given the poll's error margin of +/-4.9 percentage points, the results reflect a statistical tie.
Putting the results in context
In general, however, one should not have too much faith in the results of single polls, as they can contain large errors. Rather, one should check how a poll's results compare to benchmark forecasts.
In order to make the results comparable to forecasts from benchmark methods, we translate them into two-party vote shares. The corresponding figures are 48.3% for Clinton and 51.7% for Trump.
Comparison to other polls
If we look at an average of Georgia polls, Trump's current two-party vote share is at 52.3%. This value is 0.6 percentage points higher than his corresponding numbers in the Monmouth poll. This difference is within the poll's sampling error, which means that the poll is not an outlier.
Comparison to the combined PollyVote
The latest PollyVote foresees Trump to gain 52.6% of the two-party vote in Georgia. This means that the PollyVote forecast is 0.9 points above his polling numbers. Again, a look at the poll's margin of error suggests that this difference is negligible.
