New OpinionWorks poll in Maryland: Trump trails by a huge margin
By Results of a new poll carried out by OpinionWorks were spread. The poll asked participants from Maryland for whom they will vote: Republican Donald Trump or Democrat Hillary Clinton.
OpinionWorks poll results
Of those who responded, 54.0% said that they plan to vote for former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, while 25.0% said that they would give their vote to real estate developer Donald Trump.
The poll was conducted from August 18 to August 30. A total of 754 likely voters responded. The margin of error is +/-3.6 points. This means that the levels of voter support for both candidates differ significantly.
Putting the results in context
As any other method, polls are subject to bias. In general, you should not have too much faith in the results of a single poll. Instead of trusting the results from single polls, one should use combined polls or, even better, the combined PollyVote forecast that uses forecasts from different methods, each of which draws upon different data.
In order to make the results comparable to forecasts from other methods, one can translate them into shares of the two-party vote. This procedure yields figures of 68.4% for Clinton and 31.7% for Trump.
Results in comparison to other polls
An average of recent polls in Maryland has Clinton at 69.2% of the two-party vote. This value is 0.8 percentage points higher than her corresponding numbers in the OpinionWorks poll. This deviation is within the poll's sampling error, which suggests that the poll is not an outlier.
Results compared to the combined PollyVote forecast
The current PollyVote anticipates Clinton to gain 64.4% of the two-party vote in Maryland. This means that Polly's forecast is 4.0 points below her polling numbers. Again, a look at the poll's margin of error suggests that this difference is significant.
