New NY Times/Siena poll in North Carolina: Trump and Clinton neck-and-neck
By NY Times/Siena published the results of a new poll. In this poll, respondents from North Carolina were asked for whom they will vote: Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton.
NY Times/Siena poll results
The results show that 45.0% of participants intend to cast a ballot for former New York Senator Hillary Clinton, while 43.0% intend to cast a ballot for businessman Donald Trump.
The poll was conducted from September 16 to September 19 with 782 likely voters. The margin of error is +/-3.6 points. This means that the levels of voter support for the two candidates do not differ significantly.
Putting the results in context
As any other method, polls are subject to bias. In general, you should not rely too much on the results of an individual poll. Rather than trusting the results from single polls, research in forecasting recommends to use combined polls or, even better, the combined PollyVote forecast that draws upon different methods and data.
To make the results comparable to forecasts from other methods, one can translate them into two-party vote shares. This yields figures of 51.1% for Clinton and 48.9% for Trump.
Comparison to other polls
An average of recent polls in North Carolina sees Clinton at 49.3% of the two-party vote. This value is 1.8 percentage points lower than his corresponding numbers in the NY Times/Siena poll. This difference is within the poll's sampling error, which means that the poll is not an outlier.
Results compared to the combined PollyVote forecast
The current PollyVote anticipates Clinton to gain 50.0% of the two-party vote in North Carolina. Hence, the combined PollyVote is 1.1 points below his polling numbers. Again, a look at the poll's sampling error indicates that this difference is insignificant.
