North Carolina: Tossup between Trump and Clinton in new Suffolk University poll
By Suffolk University released the results of a new poll, in which respondents from North Carolina were asked for whom they will vote: Republican Donald Trump or Democrat Hillary Clinton.
Suffolk University poll results
According to the results, 41.0% of participants would give their vote to former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, while 44.0% are going to vote for billionaire Donald Trump.
This poll was conducted from September 5 to September 7, among a random sample of 500 likely voters. The error margin is +/-4.4 percentage points. This means that the levels of voter support for both candidates do not differ significantly.
Putting the results in context
As any other method, polls are subject to bias. Hence, a good strategy is to not put too much trust in the results of a single poll. Rather than trusting the results from single polls, you should rely on combined polls or, even better, a combined forecast that includes different methods and data.
To make the results comparable to forecasts from other methods, we translate them into two-party vote shares. This yields figures of 48.2% for Clinton and 51.8% for Trump.
Comparison to other polls
If we look at an average of North Carolina polls, Trump's current two-party vote share is at 50.7%. This value is 1.1 percentage points lower than her respective numbers in the Suffolk University poll. This margin is within the poll's error margin, which means that the poll is not an outlier.
The poll in comparison with PollyVote's forecast
The latest PollyVote foresees Trump to gain 50.0% of the two-party vote in North Carolina. Hence, Polly's combined forecast is 1.8 points below her polling numbers. The PollyVote forecast is thus in line with the poll's sampling error.
