North Carolina: Clinton tied with Trump in new Civitas (R) poll
Civitas (R) released the results of a new poll, in which respondents from North Carolina were asked for whom they will vote: Democrat candidate Hillary Clinton or Republican candidate Donald Trump.
Civitas (R) poll results
According to the results, businessman Donald Trump and former New York Senator Hillary Clinton can draw on identical levels of support, each with 42.0% of the vote.
This poll was conducted from September 11 to September 12, among a random sample of 600 likely voters. There is a sampling error of +/-4.0 percentage points. Considering this error margin, the race is currently a statistical tie.
Putting the results in context
As a general rule, however, a good strategy is to not have too much faith in the results of single polls, because they sometimes incorporate large errors. Rather than trusting the results from single polls, the best practice scientific advice is to look at combined polls or, even better, the combined PollyVote forecast that draws upon different methods and 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
An average of recent polls in North Carolina has Clinton at 49.5% of the two-party vote. When compared to the average forecast of other polls Clinton performed 0.5 percentage points better in the poll. This deviation is outside the poll's margin of error, which means that the poll is an outlier.
Comparison to the combined PollyVote
The most recent PollyVote predicts Clinton to gain 49.1% and Trump 50.9% of the two-party vote in North Carolina. Clinton has 0.9 percentage points more when the results of the poll are compared to the combined PollyVote forecast for North Carolina. Again, a look at the poll's sampling error shows that this difference is significant.