North Carolina: Trump and Clinton neck-and-neck in new Elon*Elon* poll
Results of a new poll carried out by ElonElon were published. The poll asked respondents from North Carolina for whom they will vote: Democrat Hillary Clinton or Republican Donald Trump.
ElonElon poll results
According to the results, 43.0% of participants plan to vote for former New York Senator Hillary Clinton, while 44.0% are going to vote for real estate developer Donald Trump.
The poll was conducted from September 12 to September 16. A total of 644 likely voters responded. The margin of error is +/-3.9 points, which means that the poll results for the Republican and the Democratic candidate do not differ significantly.
Putting the results in context
Individual polls can include substantial biases, which is why they should be treated with caution. Rather than trusting the results from single polls, the best practice is to consult combined polls or, even better, a combined forecast that uses forecasts from different methods, each of which draws upon different data.
To make the results comparable to benchmark forecasts, we translate them into shares of the two-party vote. The corresponding figures are 49.4% for Clinton and 50.6% for Trump.
Results in comparison to other polls
Looking at an average of North Carolina polls, Trump's two-party vote share is currently at 50.2%. This value is 0.4 percentage points lower than her respective numbers in the ElonElon 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 most recent PollyVote anticipates Trump to gain 50.8% of the two-party vote in North Carolina. That is, the PollyVote forecast is 0.2 points above her polling numbers. Again, a look at the poll's margin of error shows that this deviation is negligible.