Massachusetts: New WBUR/MassINC poll shows Trump behind by 29 points
By WBUR/MassINC released the results of a new poll, in which respondents from Massachusetts were asked for whom they will vote: Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton.
WBUR/MassINC poll results
The results show that 60.0% of interviewees are going to give their vote to former New York Senator Hillary Clinton, while 31.0% are going to vote for billionaire Donald Trump.
The poll was conducted from September 7 to September 10. A total of 506 likely voters responded. If one takes into account the poll's error margin of +/-4.4 percentage points, the gap in voter support is statistically significant.
Putting the results in context
As any other method, polls are subject to bias. Hence, a good strategy is to not be too confident the results of a single poll. At the very least, one should check how a poll's results compare to benchmark forecasts.
For the following comparison, we convert Trump's and Clinton'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
Looking at an average of Massachusetts polls, Clinton's current two-party vote share is at 63.5%. Relative to her numbers in the WBUR/MassINC poll Clinton's poll average is 2.4 percentage points lower. This difference is within the poll's sampling error, which suggests that the poll is not an outlier.
Comparison to the combined PollyVote
The latest PollyVote foresees Clinton to gain 63.9% of the two-party vote in Massachusetts. That is, Polly's prediction is 2.0 points below her polling numbers. Again, a look at the poll's sampling error suggests that this deviation is negligible.
