Minnesota: Clinton tied with Trump in latest Gravis poll
By Gravis published the results of a new poll. In this poll, participants from Minnesota were asked for whom they will vote: Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton.
Gravis poll results
The results show that both candidates can draw on the exact same level of support, each with 43.0% of the vote.
The poll was conducted from September 23 to September 23 among 906 likely voters. If one takes into account the poll's error margin of +/-3.3 percentage points, the results reflect a statistical tie.
Putting the results in context
As a general rule, however, you should not have too much faith in the results of single polls, as they sometimes contain large errors. Rather than trusting the results from single polls, the best practice is to rely on combined polls or, even better, a combined forecast that draws upon forecasts from different methods, each of which draws upon different data.
For the following analysis, we translate Clinton's and Trump's raw poll numbers into two-party vote shares. The results of the actual poll mean 50.0 % for Clinton and 50.0 % for Trump concerning the two-party vote share.
Results compared to other polls
If we look at an average of Minnesota polls, Clinton's current two-party vote share is at 52.3%. When compared to the average forecast of other polls Clinton performed 2.3 percentage points worse in the poll. This margin is outside the poll's sampling error, which means that the poll is an outlier.
Comparison to the combined PollyVote
The most recent PollyVote predicts Clinton to gain 54.6% and Trump 45.4% of the two-party vote in Minnesota. Clinton has 4.6 percentage points less when the results of the poll are compared to the combined PollyVote forecast for Minnesota. The PollyVote forecast is therefore outside the poll's error margin.
