New Emerson poll in Vermont: Trump trails by a whopping margin
Emerson released the results of a new poll, in which respondents from Vermont were asked for whom they will vote: Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton.
Emerson poll results
The results show that 47.0% of participants said that they would give their vote to former First Lady Hillary Clinton, while 26.0% plan to vote for billionaire Donald Trump.
The poll was carried out between September 2 and September 5. The sample size was 600 likely voters. The margin of error is +/-3.9 percentage points. This means that the poll results for the Republican and the Democratic candidate differ significantly.
Putting the results in context
As any other method, polls are subject to bias. Thus, as a general rule, one should not have too much faith in the results of an individual poll. Instead of trusting the results from single polls, forecasting research recommends to consult combined polls or, even better, a combined forecast that uses forecasts from different methods, each of which draws upon different data.
In order to make the results comparable to benchmark forecasts, you can convert them into shares of the two-party vote. This procedure results in values of 64.4% for Clinton and 35.6% for Trump.
The poll compared with PollyVote's prediction
The most recent PollyVote predicts Clinton to gain 63.8% of the two-party vote in Vermont. This means that the PollyVote is 0.6 points below her polling numbers. Again, a look at the poll's sampling error suggests that this deviation is negligible.