North Carolina: Clinton and Trump neck-and-neck in new NY Times/Siena poll
By Results of a new poll carried out by NY Times/Siena were distributed. The poll asked interviewees from North Carolina for whom they will vote: Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump.
NY Times/Siena poll results
Of those who responded, 45.0% said that they are going to vote for former First Lady Hillary Clinton, whereas 43.0% said that they would give their vote to real estate developer Donald Trump.
The poll was carried out from September 16 to September 19 among 782 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
Single polls should be interpreted with caution, since they may contain substantial biases. Rather than trusting the results from single polls, research in forecasting recommends to look at combined polls or, even better, the combined PollyVote forecast that relies on forecasts from different methods, each of which draws upon different data.
To make the results comparable to benchmark forecasts, one can translate them into two-party vote shares. The corresponding figures are 51.1% for Clinton and 48.9% for Trump.
Results in 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 respective numbers in the NY Times/Siena poll. This deviation 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 Clinton to gain 49.9% of the two-party vote in North Carolina. Hence, the combined PollyVote is 1.2 points below his polling numbers. The PollyVote forecast is thus in line with the poll's margin of error.
