Massachusetts: 29 points lead for Clinton in latest WBUR/MassINC poll
By WBUR/MassINC released the results of a new poll, in which respondents from Massachusetts were asked for whom they will vote: Democrat candidate Hillary Clinton or Republican candidate Donald Trump.
WBUR/MassINC poll results
According to the results, 60.0% of participants indicated that they would vote for former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, whereas 31.0% would vote for billionaire Donald Trump.
The poll was in the field between September 7 and September 10. The sample size was 506 likely voters. There is a sampling error of +/-4.4 percentage points. Considering this error margin, the gap between both candidates is statistically significant.
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, since they can contain large errors. Instead of trusting the results from single polls, the evidence-based approach is to look at combined polls or, even better, a combined forecast that relies on forecasts from different methods, each of which draws upon different data.
For the following analysis, we convert Trump's and Clinton's raw poll numbers into two-party vote shares. This yields figures of 65.9% for Clinton and 34.1% for Trump.
Results compared to other polls
If we look at an average of Massachusetts polls, Clinton's current two-party vote share is at 61.7%. This value is 4.3 percentage points lower than her corresponding numbers in the WBUR/MassINC poll. This margin is within the poll's error margin, which suggests that the poll is not an outlier.
Results compared to the combined PollyVote prediction
The latest PollyVote anticipates Clinton to gain 63.0% of the two-party vote in Massachusetts. That is, the PollyVote forecast is 2.9 points below her polling numbers. The PollyVote forecast is therefore within the poll's margin of error.
