North Carolina: New Quinnipiac poll shows Clinton with 4 points lead
By Results of a new poll conducted by Quinnipiac were circulated. The poll asked participants from North Carolina for whom they will vote: Democrat candidate Hillary Clinton or Republican candidate Donald Trump.
Quinnipiac poll results
The results show that 47.0% of participants intend to cast a ballot for former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, whereas 43.0% plan to vote for billionaire Donald Trump.
This poll was conducted from August 29 to September 7, among a random sample of 751 likely voters. There is a sampling error of +/-3.6 percentage points. Considering this error margin, the race is currently a statistical tie.
Putting the results in context
As any other method, polls are subject to bias. As a result, you should not be overly confident the results of a single poll. Instead of relying on results from single polls, one should rely on combined polls or, even better, the combined PollyVote forecast that uses forecasts from different methods, each of which uses different data.
For the following analysis, we translate Trump's and Clinton's raw poll numbers into two-party vote shares. This yields figures of 52.2% for Clinton and 47.8% for Trump.
Comparison to other polls
Looking at an average of North Carolina polls, Clinton's two-party vote share is currently at 50.3%. In comparison to her numbers in the Quinnipiac poll Clinton's poll average is 1.9 percentage points lower. This deviation is within the poll's error margin, which suggests that the poll is not an outlier.
Comparison to the combined PollyVote
The current PollyVote foresees Clinton to gain 50.1% of the two-party vote in North Carolina. That is, Polly's combined forecast is 2.1 points below her polling numbers. The PollyVote forecast is therefore within the poll's error margin.
