WBUR/MassINC poll in Massachusetts: Clinton with 29 points lead
By Results of a new poll carried out by WBUR/MassINC were released. The poll asked interviewees from Massachusetts for whom they will vote: Democrat candidate Hillary Clinton or Republican candidate Donald Trump.
WBUR/MassINC poll results
Of those who answered the question, 60.0% said that they intend to vote for former First Lady Hillary Clinton, while 31.0% declared that they would give their vote to businessman Donald Trump.
The poll was carried out from September 7 to September 10 among 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 any other method, polls are subject to bias. Hence, a good strategy is to not put too much trust in the results of an individual poll. Rather than relying on results from single polls, the best practice is to consult combined polls or, even better, the combined PollyVote forecast that includes forecasts from different methods, each of which draws upon different data.
For the following comparison, we convert Clinton's and Trump's raw poll numbers into shares of the two-party vote. This yields figures of 65.9% for Clinton and 34.1% for Trump.
Comparison to other polls
Clinton currently achieves 61.7% of the major two-party vote in an average of recent polls in Massachusetts. This value is 4.3 percentage points lower than her corresponding numbers in the WBUR/MassINC poll. This deviation is within the poll's margin of error, which means that the poll is not an outlier.
Comparison to the combined PollyVote
The most recent PollyVote foresees Clinton to gain 62.9% of the two-party vote in Massachusetts. That is, Polly's forecast is 3.0 points below her polling numbers. Again, a look at the poll's error margin suggests that this difference is negligible.
