New Emerson poll in Florida: Trump and Clinton neck-and-neck
By Emerson released the results of a new poll, in which respondents from Florida were asked for whom they will vote: Republican nominee Donald Trump or Democrat nominee Hillary Clinton.
Florida is traditionally a purple state, where Democrats and Republicans have historically won similar voter support. Therefore, the election outcome here is viewed as important in determining the overall result of the presidential election.
Emerson poll results
Of those who answered the question, 44.0% said that they intend to vote for former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, while 45.0% declared that they would give their vote to businessman Donald Trump.
The poll was carried out from October 2 to October 4 with 600 likely voters. Considering the poll's sampling error of +/-3.9 percentage points, the results reflect a statistical tie.
Putting the results in context
As any other method, polls are subject to bias. Therefore, as a general rule, don't have too much faith in the results of an individual poll. At the very least, one should examine how a poll's results compare to benchmark forecasts.
For the following analysis, we translate Trump's and Clinton's raw poll numbers into shares of the two-party vote. This yields figures of 49.4% for Clinton and 50.6% for Trump.
Comparison to other polls
If we look at an average of Florida polls, Trump's current two-party vote share is at 48.4%. Relative to her numbers in the Emerson poll Trump's poll average is 2.2 percentage points worse. This difference is within the poll's margin of error, which suggests that the poll is not an outlier.
Results compared to the combined PollyVote prediction
The latest PollyVote expects Trump to gain 49.6% of the two-party vote in Florida. This means that the PollyVote is 1.0 point below her polling numbers. Again, a look at the poll's sampling error shows that this difference is insignificant.
